Third Eye Over the Horizon
by Bethany Ugolino
Summary: A facially marred woman seeks revenge and absolution in Egypt, while finding herself unexpectedly involved with one Ardeth Bey.
1. Default Chapter

Disclaimer: I do not own any of the original "Mummy" characters. No infringement intended. I do own Boann, Drostan, Kell and Diarmuid, and they are poor-man-copywritten.

I'm jumping the story ahead about four years, so just pretend that "The Mummy" took place around 1927, and this is a year afterwards.

This story does contain some graphic speech concerning murder, mutilation, incest, and molestation. The reader should be forewarned of this.

Pronunciation key for names:

Boann – BOO - an,

Diarmuid – DEER - mid(t), "without envy," "freeman," a warrior who had a mark on his head, causing women to fall in love with him.

Drostan – DROST - an, "noisy one".

Ciannait - KEE-an-awt

Reviews are very welcome and much appreciated!


	2. So Camels May Spit Easy

"And so, that is why I believe that camel's are in fact a superi'r thing to people. People have very much ought to be able to spit and carry water in their fats I would think!"

Richard O'Connell's eyes stung unbearably in the painfully eloquent dance of the desert sand, and this almost matched the pain of rolling them in all-night Ferris-wheels within their sockets at the truly, impressively incessant dithering of the young wretch his wife had insisted in hiring as a guide to the dig site. Every minute or five he would shoot a look from atop his camel at the dirty, heavily cloth-bound man atop a sore-encrusted and tired excuse of equestrian creation, and honestly feel a slight wretch. The fact that he hated the Irish gave no relief, especially since this one had failed to loose his accent in his time in Egypt.

"What'd'you think of camels, eh, Rick... Mr. Rick... Mr... O'Connell..."

Drostan was not making a very profitable impression on their new client. It was treacheros ground to him, conversation with the employers who were in a way employees – and though he made sure never to drop conversation, he had been tossing that dilemma to a stomach ache within the back of his head. Was he an employee, or were they the employee. Or were they the employed... was that even different? he had thought.

As he watched Rick's hands become white, and his eyes dilate in what he could only assume to be utter and unadulterated rage, he turned to his wife. He meant, Rick's wife, of course.

"And you, Mrs. O'Connell? Dun' ya' think camels are awful swell?"

Evelyn O'Connell was faring far better than her husband. She, who rode on the other side of Drostan from Rick on a separate rented camel, was fully engrossed in the subject of the other half to the compassing package. When she and Rick had returned to Egypt for this particular commissioned dig, and had found this young, boundingly talkative, and starving young man to be something of a guide in the deeper regions of the Sahara, she sniffed out the bluff immediately. But she insisted they be hired, for it was obvious they needed the food, money, and, perhaps, the civil company. But it was also his companion that had swayed her. Drostan looked nothing of a true adventurer, all thumbs and clumsy, with a rusty pistol and not two weeks worth of viable muscle left on his arms and legs, but the woman who sat with him on the street, at the base of the most magnificent white horse Evie has ever seen – one that would have surely caught them a month's worth of food – she seconded the cover of her own generosity, certain that there was something deeply wise beneath the fold of black cloth that the woman's face hid behind. At least something special under there, for a man so deprived to bind himself so faithfully to her side as Drostan seemed to.

And indeed, she wore cloth by the folds of hundreds. Blacks and grey, worn and new, possibly stolen. Evie was sure she would capsize under their weight, assuming that she was in the condition her spoken betrothed was in. He had called her by the name Boann, though she never spoke it herself. In fact she spoke nothing. But Evie was surprised to find the creature very able and strong, and excellent with the horse, as was, for all his clumsiness, Drostan. She rode gracefully though, a good four yards behind the other three, her horse glistening in a frothy film of sweat, but her own face never showing beneath the black. Evie wondered how she seemed to see so precisely.

"Mrs. O'Connell... Ms. Evelyn..."

Evelyn slapped her face back from it's peripheral examination of their rear companion to the sound of Drostan calling her name. "I'm sorry, I wasn't paying attention. What was it that you asked?"

"Eh, nothing. You're tired, it's hot, and I'm hungry..." Drostan then pulled a slip of bread from his saddlebag and began to chomp on it rudely. He was filling out and livening up a bit once they had fed him a few times. Rick was certain that his physical state was a self-induced marketing ploy for pity, and that in truth he was perfectly healthy, just a bit naturally scrawny. Rick hadn't been so intrigued by his fiancee as Evelyn. Just another eccentric to him, though he seemed to find little else in Egypt. Evelyn and he had been married less than a year, and had thus had less than a year to recover from their last... "adventure" in Egypt, when Pembridge found it suitable to pack them back into the country for a dig concerning God-knows-what in God-knows-where for God-knows-who. Well, God and Evelyn, it would seem. She jumped at the idea, and had also, apparently, christened herself a "Generosa" as well. Rick loved Egypt, and he loved Evie, but for Christ's sake, he wanted at least a year. He had felt some trepidation over taken two strangers with them into the middle of nowhere, but it was clear that they would into be difficult to overtake, if need be.

Drostan actually fell rather silently as he ate. Evelyn was also quiet, her face crooked slightly to the side, as if observing something in the scenery. Rick noticed this, and reveled in it.

Just as the silence began to take a comfortable fit to the four travelers, Evie found herself turning her head to an unexpected surprise. Upon a sharply cut dune in the distance, to the side of them, was a line of darkly clad riders. Bedouins, for sure, and even more surely, Medjai, she thought. Evie became rather excited, having not seen their mysterious allies in so many months, and having been in hope that they may cross paths on this journey. She swerved her camel to the forefront, left-hand most flank of the small caravan and waved enthusiastically to the riders.

It was now that Rick noticed what had made his wife gasp and exhale so. Caught in her reaction, he also forgot himself, believing that they had spotted their friends as well.

But it was Drostan's familiarly thick voice that brought the two from their excitement.

"We're just waving to some friends. They are not dangerous... well, they are dangerous," Evie explained to Drostan, "but they will not hurt us. We know them."

"Are you sure you know them, they don't seem to be noticin' you, and I honestly don't think they were in a position in which they were expecting to be seen..."

"Well of course not, because they weren't expecting us," Evie scolded cheerfully and continued to wave at them from her camel and cry out.

Rick began to hesitate at Drostan words, and even more so when Drostan's silent half came riding up in amidst them. Her closeness emitted several sensory solicitations. She did not smell bad, as Drostan did, yet Rick could not say he liked the way she smelled. And she appeared much more brooding so near and on top of her horse. Far to strong then he was comfortable feeling a woman to be. She deliberated, and then quickly, she finally spoke to them. Her voice was muffled by the cloth, and from what Rick could tell, was even more heavily accented than Drostan's. He asked her to repeat, and as each of their eyes caught from atop te hill the metallic glint of a firearm, she threw down the cloth from around her mouth to encircle her neck and shouted in a crackling, enphlegmed and to an "I" Irish voice, "They are no friends!"

The bullet then lacerated the air between the shoulder's of Boann and Rick. Immediately Rick had his guns drawn and warm, but did this sluggishly slow compared to Boann, who, it appeared, was packing an impressive array of weaponry, and apparently had the pallet for it. Evie, not one to duck, also drew the small pistol that Rick had taught her to fire, and Drostan revealed a similarly astonishing pair of guns. But there was no way in Hell the four of them, even with the experience they seemed to present, would be able to rival a line of at least fifteen desert-grounded bandits, all wielding machinery to at least outfit theirs. This was made even more clear as the line began to move quickly, with expert movement, on fast steeds down the side of the dune.

Rick watched as Boann wiped her horse around itself and then forward into the onslaught. He signaled Evie to stay back, though Drostan edged forward as well. Boann took down three, and Rick was able to fall another two. Evie was edging backwards, her pistol still aimed, and Drostan continued to fire fiercely.

Evie couldn't describe the fear she felt. She had thought that nothing could daunt her after battling a creature who's body was not a body, and who's life was founded upon death. But she was wrong. She could feel death crawl under her skin and into her heart. Tears ripped her cheeks as she watched her freshly-made husband being flanked by oncoming attackers. She had lost sight of Boann and Drostan. Evie shut her eyes, her arm still outstretched, waiting for the final shot to take her, when she felt the wind cut her shoulders as horseman came riding in from the back of her at sportscar speeds. Her eyelids delayed, unsure if the wind was simply playing tricks on her, or if a saving element had really entered the sudden battle.

Sure enough, as her eyes opened, she saw the backs of what was this time unmistakably the Medjai, entering with gun and sword by the dozens. They sandwiched, stomped, sheared and obliterated. The battle flew through the minutes, as both Medjai and bandit fell in turn. But it was the bandits that eventually gathered their remains and fled.

Rick quickly found Evelyn, who had climbed form her camel and nearly collapsed on the ground, he clung her to him, completely out of breath and slightly brazed. As the Medjai grouped together, some still mounted, others tending to wounds and walking in review on the sand, Evie watched from over Rick's shoulder as some of them encircled a familiar friend, who was crouched to the ground next to a fallen man. Ardeth Bey.

The Medjai chieftain was not observed by only Evelyn. Boann, who had been dismounted in the battle, had also caught sight of the geometrically inclined Bedouins who had mysterious come to their aid. She could not see what they were doing, and thus stepped about the panorama from a distance in order to slip her eyes between two of their black-clad bodies. She did so, all the time keeping a hand on the reigns of her white horse. She saw a man, his head still shrouded, fall over another who lay breathing like a cat, so quickly he was surely sucking oxygen from the rest, she thought. She watched as he lifted the mans head. She saw blood, thick and inhabited by pieces of matter, fall from the side of his skull unseen to her. Yet he was alive. She watched his neck snap under the strong hands of the kneeling man. All of this at a distance from her, fascinating to her. She forgot herself...

Evie's eyes had crushed in tears as she watched the euthanasia take place. As they reopened she panned around and away from the warriors. She spotted Drostan, panting and nursing an arm wound. And then she saw something she did not recognized. Still and somber, a woman stood, dressed in black, with a sack's worth of black curls piled on top of her head. Her skin was as white as the sand under the reflection of her husband's watch, though it was unkept and a bit dirty. It took Evie a few moments to realize it was an unsheathed Boann, as she soon caught hold of her white horse's reigns. As the distant woman's attention fell from the regrouping warriors, and she turned her body to face the resting couple, her eyes downcast at her hands, Evie saw a black smudge across one side of her face... a bit on the forehead... she couldn't make out what it was, though.

But Evie could make out what just happened. A small-scale battle had just taken place, and these two near strangers, who she had sized to be half-starved and weak, had fought more readily and bravely than was certainly necessary. She stared at Boann, wondering who exactly she and her husband had invited along into the middle of the desert with them.

Ardeth looked up from his fallen comrade, having completed one of the more unpleasant requirements of his status, to assess the damage, and the addition of his band. He had spotted the four of them, Evelyn, Rick, and the two strangers, from a distant slope. They had distracted him from the bandits grouping on the other side of them, as he was sure he recognized the two on top of the camels to be Evie and Rick. Even from a distance, he was sure that that shot of black hair and that white-strapped-brown torso were them. As the bandits practically fell down the dune, shooting and crying out at the outnumbered, he quickly ordered his men into action. O'Connells or not, they were in danger.

And indeed, at the end of the battle, Ardeth spotted Evelyn and Rick, tending to their dissipating shock. He then sought out the other two who traveled with them. He spotted the boy, who was apparently a rather wispy man, and then the woman. She was tending to her horse – a creature of no contest in beauty and power – and he noticed two things. She was very pale, and very strong. As he stood to approach Evie and Rick, he watched the woman suddenly catch herself with a start, and quickly scrambled about herself for a stray piece of cloth. She was attempting to cover her face. She had lost her head covering in the battle, and had just realized this. Ardeth watched as long as his moving feet would permit as she delicately covered the affected side of her face before he diverted his attention to Evie and Rick.

They were both standing now, Rick checking Evie out for injuries and the such. Evie immediately stepped forward to address the nearing Ardeth.

"Oh, Ardeth, I am so happy that... that it is you!" Ardeth was slightly confused, but still overjoyed to see his friends safe, and to see them at all. Rick was the next to approach. He gave him a formidable handshake and a pat on the back.

"My friends, what are you doing back in Egypt and, of course, already causing trouble?" Ardeth said in a thick English, a twinged smile playing on his girthy lips.

"Well, we were on our way to a dig, when we found ourselves being, oh... I dunno... attacked?" Rick was a little more than agitated.

Evie attempted to calm her husband down slightly, as Drostan came up alongside her on foot.

"Now, that was an adventure, eh Mr. O'Connell?" He gave Rick a harder-than-need-be slap on the back, and Rick coughed with exhaustion and pain.

"Who is this man?" Ardeth asked full out-right. "And the woman, as well..." He looked in the direction he had initially seen Boann in, but she was no longer standing there.

"Well, they were guides, of a sort," Evie attempted.

"Though I guess this in't the best time to say this, but we aren't much for guides..." And then he added, "at all... in any way, really."

Evelyn gave Drostan an exasperated look while Rick clenched and turned his entire body around in an expression of temper. At this time Ardeth's head turned at the sound of quick and close coming hooves on the sand. It was Boann, the black cloth covering the entirety of her hair and forehead, and then strapped down around the right side of her face, tucked into the fabric clinging around her neck. Her one eye glanced quickly over the three friends and remaining warriors who had gathered about them, and though it was only for a second, the dark flame that rested within that eye would not so quickly escape Ardeth's memory.

"Drostan, get your bleedin' arse on this horse immediately! We're going back."

Drostan's eyes dragged on the ground sheepishly, "And she's not exactly my fiancee either." The thin man shrugged in his turn, while Boann continued to extend her hand to him.

"Drostan we've gotta go. Now. I mean it – up!"

Drostan looked about him, and acknowledged that indeed, his horse had fallen in the battle. But he did not see why they had to leave, and without their charges.

Boann looked hot at that, her face flushing with embarrassment. "Drostan, we... just do. Now please..."

"Madame," Ardeth decided, though unwise, it was perhaps necessary for him to intervene, "It is dangerous to head back now, alone. You could be attacked again, or worse, get lost."

"I know my way, sir. He dun't, but I do. Drostan, please..." the woman was becoming increasingly nervous. Her voice was deep, liken to a man's, almost. And her speech was clear, precise and strong. But her posture began became twitchy the longer Drostan openly defied her command.

"Look, Boann," Evie began, "this tribe has been our faithful ally in the past. Yo have nothing to fear." At the word "fear", Boann's torso bolted up-right in offense. Evie noted this, and continued more cautiously, "It would be dangerous to bolt off right at this minute. I mean, it isn't everyday that you are simply charged at by desert bandits." Evie gave a forced laugh at that statement. "There may be something... happening..."

"It'd be unusual had a certain someone not screamed and hollered like a madwoman at the bleeding Bedouins!"

"Hey!"

Rick's exclamation cut through the air as he shouldered his way in confrontation towards Boann. Evie stepped back in offense, while Ardeth put a restraining hand on Rick's shoulder. Drostan, feeling the tension rise and seeing the crowd assimilate quickly among the warriors, moved to compromise.

"Boann, at least let a few of them show us back. I don't have complete faith in your memory and am a bit scared of getting lost, in honesty." His voice was slightly more pleading now, and nervous at his vulnerable words. But Ardeth seconded his request.

"I would be happy to spare a few men for your return, if you wish to at this moment."

"Spare?" Boann shrieked lowly. Her horse took a few high steps at the sound. "Spare. No thank you, sir."

"Just..." Ardeth was cut off.

"We do not ride with desert peoples!" There was a pause thick with tension.

"Boann..." Drostan's voice was barely a whisper

"No Drostan. Now if you don't get your fucking arse onto this horse I'll sodomize you with your own leg!"

"We'll be the one's sodomizing you if you don't mind," cried one of the warriors from the back, who was now pushing to the forefront in a palpable wrath at Boann's prejudice-tinged exclamation. But Ardeth stopped him. He could see in Boann's eyes, not fear, perchance, and not offense, but something blank coat over them. They became two-dimensional at the threat, as if they would refuse to absorb the reflection of the sun any longer. It was more unsettling than fear, and it was one of many elements signaling to cut this brawl short.

"No. Let them go. If she feels she must leave, than they should be permitted to."

Boann shot him a short glance, her one eye flaring with dark colors Ardeth had never imagined before. But Drostan only gave her oncoming glance a rivaled one. He stood his ground. "No. Boann I'm staying. I want to go the rest of the way with the O'Connell's, with or without you."

Ardeth noted a slight metaphorical step back in Boann's half face. She was expressionless, but he could imagine that she did not expect such a response. There was a pause, sewn with tight deliberation. When Boann spoke, it was like a crackling rope being tied into a knot.

"Fine. We shall go. Evelyn, Richard, except my apology." She did not give them a chance to answer her request, and stepped up beside Drostan, offering a slightly kinder hand to help him up.

"Dun think I'm riding with you, lassy. I'll take my chances with one of these strapping young things." He gave one of the warriors an all-to-friendly rub on the back, only to find dark, and slightly lecherous eyes returning his gesture. He took a few steps back to the laughter of the tribe. Boann exclaimed formlessly at his response, and walked the horse off.

Ardeth was already conversing with Evie and Rick. Greetings and arrangements were fulfilled. Ardeth and a few of his men would accompany the couple and their companions the rest of the way to the dig. The rest of the men dispersed, and Drostan mounted with one of the Medjai. A quiet, older one, who seemed like he could hold his own against Drostan's chatter. Boann stayed silently atop her horse, soon wrapping the rest of her face in cloth. Though she tagged a ways behind the other six, Ardeth found his senses attaching themselves to whatever alert her presence might have emitted.


	3. The Sardonic Beerbottles of HalfFaces

* * *

The dig site was still another few day's ride after Ardeth and his three men joined the O'Connell's and the McNamara's. As Drostan traveled on the back of Adil's horse, Evelyn was able to unravel their illustrious con.

Drostan McNamara and Boann McNamara Mulhern were not engaged, but in fact, cousins, on her father's side. The betrothed gimmick apparently helped the pity factor in the begging of street-hires. He was twenty-seven years old, they had been living there for nine years now, spoke fluid Arabic, and had been completely unemployed for several months.

"Boann's actually cleaner than a nun – well, with houses and such, at least... or at most – and has kept housekeeping jobs for years on end. The only problem is getting her hired in the first place..." At that, Drostan trailed off. He did not elaborate on this vocational handicap, moving on to other, more anecdotal aspects of their life in Egypt. When Evie tried to pry from his jaw why he and his cousin would pose as desert guides when in truth they knew so dangerously little, he would dodge her inquiry with a skill beyond his apparent intelligence.

Ardeth also listened to Drostan's stories. He attended to the exchange between Drostan and Evie about recent adventures with a partial ear. The rest of his attention dedicated itself to the woman Boann. She had covered her entire face again in the faded black scraps she wore. He was impressed by the stamina and skill of her horse. It was not an Arabian, but it was certainly too small to be a standard breed. It did not step high in a proper fashion, nor did it trudge like a work horse. It seemed to glide under her thin hands' command.

He kept back his own horse – a glass-eye-black Arabian, highly decorated with Bedouin decor – trying to get a bit more even with her white creature. Ardeth had been leader of the Medjai for three years now, a considerably small fraction of his twenty-eight, yet he had witnessed the culmination of his tribe's fears, and the eventual dissipation of them. In truth Ardeth struggled almost visibly every day with his title, and it's accumulation. He was surprisingly unmarried, though only surprising in a cultural context. What little animal impulses he reacted to were increased by his obvious curiosity towards Boann. In many ways, he felt she tried to avoid attention, but only seethed it towards her in doing so.

He had gathered that she was mal-nourished by what little he could see of her arms. He did not need to be told that they were essentially beggars. But she was most definitely strong. Unbelievably so for a woman. She could fire a pistol with militaristic precision, and throw a punch to kick one's eyebrows to their medulla. But he had noted from what he had observed from the battle that she would avoid the swords. She was not classically trained in warfare, although she did utilize quite a pocket knife.

Her accent was familiar. Not as plump as the Scottish – it was most definitely Celtic though. From Drostan he learned that it was in fact Irish. What little he had seen of her features when they were undressed was unsatisfying to his visual assessment. She was miraculously pale, freckle-less, with, judging from the far-off view he got of her naked head, dark dark hair. Black. Her eyes, or eye, as he had only seen one, was darker than black. Darker than his. Darker than his mother's. Her jaw was very square, unlike his more angular line, and Drostan's soft facial curvation. Her nose was slightly crooked, and her lips were thick and finely cut as they smeared into her cheeks, with a sharp curve in the undercleft of the mouth. Not much else was visible, and he was unable to pass full judgement on her face as such, but his premature conclusion was that she was indeed unattractive. Far too manly for most people's taste. But, ever since Ardeth was a small boy, too small to precisely remembered, he had an unexplainable fixation with technically unattractive creatures. He had always assumed it was from being surrounded by the dead for nearly all his life, whether in doctrine or in reality.

He spent several minutes contemplating the purpose of the facial cloth. It made no sense as a barrier, for it covered her eyes. In the end he ruled it down to several possibilities; an unsightly birthmark or natural disfiguration of some sort – pinched skin, bulbous acne, warts, etc.; possibly a burn, or maybe even a disease. Some sort of boil picked up on the streets. In truth he did not know. He had also considered cataracts in her right eye, yet this wouldn't explain the need to cover so much of her face, unless she didn't want any sort of patch to be seen either.

While running through each possibility, Ardeth had nearly been eluded by Boann's approach alongside him. She wasn't terribly tall, but sat strait on her horse. He admired the beast up close, and couldn't help himself,

"That's a beautiful creature," he found himself saying in English.

The shrouded head turned slightly to face him, and here he saw that the fabric over her left eye was so thin that she could very well see through it to him. After several seconds of silence, she gently, with a hand that was calloused, scabbed, scarred and knuckly, pulled the cloth down away from the left side of her face.

"Thank you," she returned in Arabic. Her accent was decent, though not impenetrable for it's European twinge.

"Good breed, looks very strong and young," he responded in Arabic as well.

"Yes," was all she said.

"You fight very well," he continued, skillfully avoiding questions, lest he drive her unexpected cooperation to his curiosity asunder. He was also simply unable to find his transitions at the moment. He was a little... intimidated.

"Thanks," was all she said. Ardeth was unsure of where to go from this. He deliberated...

"Right." She fell silent after he had spoken, but continued to ride alongside him.

"You're Medjai," he then heard. "For Humunaptra and all. Dead city." Her Arabic was not so much at fault for her lack of eloquence, he could detect; it was that she was like her cousin, uneducated, clearly. Yet educated in a way that in this day is considered useless, yet to him, and the hundred before him, is invaluable.

"Yes, we are. I am the Chief." She gave a twinge of expression at this. It was approving, but slight.

"And so, I suppose Immy's not been giving you trouble for the past year then, eh?"

Ardeth stared at her in shock. He supposed that Evelyn and Rick may have told them the story, but not if they expected a chance in Hell of them coming out here. Boann smirked slightly, half her mouth curling out from under the cloth.

"How do you know about Imhotep?"

"How do _you_ know?"

He realized that this question was not naive or stupid, but completely sardonic. He chuckled with a surprisingly malleable sense of humor.

"I've heard bits and pieces here and there," he responded, finding a tinge of a smile biting at her lips, but only for a second. She was a hard girl to get to smile.

Drostan's voice was sailing backwards towards Boann's thin frame. Ardeth could break her ribcage with one hand, he realized. He could break it and take out her heart. He didn't know why this thought came to him.

"The arse doesn't need a drink he needs a smack in the ass," he heard her mumble.

"Or a lobotomy," he spouted. She curled her one brow in a second of confusion, but made an effort to look unperturbed.

"Or a blow job," she finished. Ardeth felt a laugh like wax crackling foam in his throat. He liked her, a bit, he thought. She was so curious. At one moment hateful, and at the other, perfectly humored. Evelyn had said they were eager to come into the desert, but why, then, was she so malign to the idea of continuing with Medjai?

Boann raised a darkly colored glass bottle, waving it at Drostan before uncorking it with her teeth. She began to ride swiftly to where he sat, not spilling a drop of the bottle's contents. She handed it to Drostan, who took a throat-charring gulp that lasted several minutes. Ardeth watched with a slight amount of amusement as Drostan was slowly, stupidly draining Boann of her alcohol. Boann was becoming impatient. Ardeth was adapting to the language of her shoulders – minute twitches and molestations of movements with agitation. Boann began to calmly slap Drostan's hand that held the bottle, he swat her away – all the while still moving – several times. Finally, with one deft movement, Boann swept the bottle from Drostan's lips like a perfect lover would sweep a woman off her feet, and in some brand of bar-room ceremoniousness, crashed the nearly empty bottle over Drostan's head. He fell back, unconscious, dangled off the horse's rear. The two young Medjai laughed and cheered at the quick, and seemingly simple silencing. Rick secretly congratulated Boann, inside his head, while Evie looked concerned.

Ardeth was somewhere between unimpressed apathy and interested amazement. Boann, well, she laughed now, hearty and full as she glided around in a half circle from Drostan's limp body, after carefully checking that his throat passages were clear of liquid. She laughed like a demon, like a goddess, like a cataract-clairvoyant lioness .


	4. The Fear of Wanting to Want

Thanks for the reviews everyone!

And I know that I'm taking some extreme liberties in the chapter, so forgive me.

* * *

Like flesh on fire, scraped from waxen bones to reveal lips so red they dripped their color over cold and sandy finger nails, the sun set. It set like flowers and like virgins and like a veil ascending over a moon-white face. Ardeth saw the sunset different every night. It was the only thing that ever changed to him, the only thing that was not a constant. Until today.

The creature Boann was gracefully sweating teardrops over the fire into the large black pot the tribe had supplied her. Instead of ground meal and bread, as they would have prepared, the woman had offered to make a stew, which would keep better when cold. Drostan had explained that this would normally be made with potatoes, but worked just as well with oats and rice. The three men Ardeth had brought with him were surprisingly compliant – he wondered if she had them spooked. Or else it was simply because she was using her own water, and not theirs.

He was watching her as she worked. She had rolled up her sleeves to reveal taught arms. A total of three tattoos littered her wrists and forearms, all in black. Two were solely decorative, the other had a sample of text with it. She had also let loose part of her hair from her veil, which was tied up over and under her veil. She could capsize under that amount of hair, he thought.

When the meal was finished, Ardeth, his men and the O'Connell's found it rather delicious. A good waste of water, he thought.

"Where'd you learn to make this," Evie asked politely.

"Back in Ireland," Drostan replied for Boann. "I 'member Boann's ma making it when I was wee, and... I think... Ann didn't Brady make it, as well?"

"No. Da's wife made it a few times, though." Boann's voice was unwavering, but her eyes were losing their convexity again,

"Right. Anyways, like I said, keeps well." Drostan finished with a bite.

"How long did the two of you live in Ireland?" Ardeth asked.

Drostan swallowed, "Um... before Kell died, er... Boann's ma, I mean... where was I... before Kell died, we'd lived their only about uh... two years? Well, two for me, 'cause I was only two. That makes five for Boann. Then we moved back for about eight years."

"Seven years." Boann corrected him.

"Oh, seven, right."

"Were you their during the war at all?" Rick asked. Ardeth had a vague idea of what he might be talking about.

"Em... yes, but we got out before it became 'Civil'" Drostan responded. Boann had eaten about three bites, and said an equivalent amount of words, yet she excused herself lowly, set down her bowl and walked away from the fire after chatting something to Drostan in a tongue Ardeth did not understand. Ardeth felt a twitch to stand, but Drostan signaled him down. As she left, though, Ardeth saw the twinkle of a beaded chain around her belt, next to what he assumed was a sack of bullets. He would later conclude that it was indeed a rosary.

"Annie's not too people-ly, if you know what I mean."

"We've noticed," said Adil in thick English.

Evie deliberated visibly. She was struggling with a question, or a statement, and Rick noticed this. Not to be as polite as his wife, he prepared to say what he knew she was cooking to say.

"Well, you'd be too if you were... her."

It was Drostan who spoke before Rick could even ask.

"And what is it about her?" Rick asked.

Drostan was hesitantly preparing to speak words that seemed to hold an immense amount of poignancy even before they were spoken.

"Ann's face..." Drostan's mouth pinched in what looked to be a great amount of pain at having to force the muscles to speak. "...she lost an eye."

The group was slightly taken aback. Ardeth not as much, having already tossed these ideas within his head. Instead, he pressed on, much to Evelyn's shock.

"Blind, or completely absent?"

"Ardeth!" Evie was appalled by Ardeth's questioning, and Rick was not entirely sure what to make of it either, but Drostan was an easy talker.

"Oh, all-the-way gone. Actually, we always wondered iffin a few pieces of it had stuck under the scar flesh. No way to really find out I guess." A few pieces... Cut out of her socket, and Ardeth was able to visualize it. The gelatinous humors seeping at the puncture of the bulb – slowly though, not quickly, mixing like batter with the blood and flesh by the hand of a very careful cook. He could picture it in terrible detail.

"Good God, that's so awful."

At Evie's concern, Drostan began to giggle. Then laugh. Then cackle rather hysterically.

"Mmmm, not that awful love. Not too awful." He said through his laughter. At that he took another sickeningly large spoonful of the stew into his mouth, and swallowed with a watery sound.

* * *

The four Medjai had set up two small tents, one for Evie and Rick, the other for Boann and Drostan. The Medjai would take turns keeping watch. There was still another two days at least after this, and Ardeth's one concern was getting the O'Connell's there alive.

Alright, not his one concern, perhaps. One of his concerns. The other being Boann, of course. While the O'Connell's had gone to bed, and Drostan had fallen out with yet another bottle of liquor at his chest just outside of his tent, Boann was sitting at the edge of their encampment, with her horse, taking advantage of the cool cool night to smoke a finely rolled cigarette.

Ardeth sat by the failing embers a while, simply staring at her. He knew that she knew he was looking, he could read it in her shoulders. They were thickly laden with cloth and robes, and he wondered what they looked like. Were they frail, or strong? Did her clavicle curve far out into them, or was it hidden behind muscle or a secret supply of fat? Did she roll one and then the other out of nervousness, or was that some sort of threat that he felt in her movement?

Threat, or pity. Here is a woman robbed of a face, he thought. She was cycloptic, rendered unattractive for the rest of her life. To him, this was a terrible fate. A woman has it hard enough in the world, to have to be left without the one thing that would have been on her side.

He wondered how it happened. How did this skinny little white thing aggravate a knife into her eye socket.

Before he knew it, he was sitting beside her, walking carefully across the sand to her and her horse. He sat gently beside her. As he had neared, it became apparent that she had relinquished her veil in the almost-privacy of the night and her cigarette. As he sat down, he saw the black strip of frayed cloth that spun around her skull and over the mass or flesh. As she brought the cigarette to her lips, by the light of her inhalation he saw a few solitary scars dance in the shadows down her cheeks, like the razor-trails of acid tears that had once fallen from her right eye.

She was silent for several minutes. Her shoulders were tense, but Ardeth was not. He relaxed himself the best he could, taking in the even more unappealing picture that the symmetry of her face painted.

"What's his name, your horse, Boann?"

Boann did not look at him. She exhaled the hot smoke, the smell and texture and heat of which comforted him in the cold desert night.

"It's a she."

"Sorry. What is her name?"

"... Ciannait."

"That's an odd name." Boann said nothing to this. She simply took another drag, as the horse snorted with a disapproving laugh.

"What does it mean?"

"It means 'ancient' in Gaelic." She said, now in English. Ardeth suspected the next morning that it was because there was no Arabic word for "Gaelic," that she knew of. He responded in English:

"Where did you find it?"

"It was my mother's. When we first came to Egypt, she bought it for next-to-nothing. When I returned seven years later, I found and bought it again."

Ardeth was amazed. "It must be over twenty years old then! It's impossible that ths is the same horse."

Boann gave him a side-long glance, and the splinter of her cornea against the glow of her eye was enough to show him the possibility. He changed the subject.

"Does you're name mean anything?"

"Not in the same way," she said. She looked at him then face on, her one marble eye falling on his face like a bird's beak to his eyes. One liquorice curl tickled her brow in a slightly glamorous way.

"Then in what way?" He asked.

"Boann can mean 'she of the white cattle,' but it depends which story. She was a goddess of fertility and of cows. I'm named after a pregnant cow, mhm, you can laugh at that if you like."

Ardeth did chuckle. Her invitation was out of good humor, he could tell. She continued:

"Another story is that she released the river Boyne in Ireland from the Well of Segais, the well of knowledge. Her bloke was s'possed to protect it, and she snuck out and busted it, somehow. I don't 'member. A bit like Eve let out the tree, 'cause it let out knowledge and inspiration to the world."

"That's beautiful," Ardeth responded, although he knew it was not supposed to be.

"Yeah. Then the third part is that she had an affair with the Father god Dagda, and bore the son Angus, I think. He has another name or something." She twirled her hand and the cigarette smoke made lattices in the sky.

"But I thought you said she was married?"

"Aye, she is. This is my favorite part: because her husband, Nechtan was jealous, and not on good terms with Dagda, having lost the Well already, Dagda held up the sun," and she took her boney hand and cupped the moon in the sky instead. "He held up the sun for nine months, so that her pregnancy only lasted one day, and she could bear her child for him without being killed."

Ardeth was staring at her now dropped hand. Give her a few drinks and some trust, and she could take you places with a story, he thought.

"What 'bout you're name? What does it mean?"

"'Able one'. Terribly unexciting, eh?" He said with a small smile.

"It seems true enough."

"Oh, that it is, just ask any woman in my tribe," he said this with a strait face, of course, before spreading it to a buttery smile.

Boann chuckled quietly; a soft victory for Ardeth. Upon resuming her composure, Ardeth decided to give her that she had a nice smile.

"Well, you were certainly named for the position. Saving Egypt and all."

"Oh, and the world, too."

"Heh, aye, the world, too."

Ardeth smiled proudly. "Ability is the most important part of the job, I believe."

"Job?"

"Protection."

"I didn't realize it was a 'job'."

"Of course it is."

"Then let me ask you this..." Boann turned her entire body to face him. Her shoulders square and her spine strait. "How many have you killed in that protection?"

"... I don't know."

"You do no count?"

"Of course not."

"I've always wondered if the desert tribes counted."

"Well we do not." Ardeth found his voice harsh as it escaped his lips and touched her face. Out of vengeance and out of offense and out of unbearable desire he then asked, "Do you count yours?" He was unable to keep his alternate pronunciation of "count" from slipping.

Boann laughed at that. A thick laugh sewn with smoke. "Yes, actually, I do."

Ardeth was unsure of what to say to that. He fell silent for several moments, collecting his thoughts. He began, in a nicer tone, to change the subject.

"Why did your mother bring you to Egypt in the first place?"

"She wanted to get away from Ireland, I think. Bad people and bad memories. My da was a ...'bad people'. She was always doing crazy things like, well, running off to Egypt, f'example. She was pretty crazy. Free spirit, or whatever. But of course, Egypt was not the opp'site image she had wanted. She ended up with the same sort of husband in the same sort of position in society. Except now she was a Muslim, and I suppose she had a slightly greater amount of freedom. Enough to go out and get... get out."

"She converted? From... Christianity?"

"Catholicism."

"Oh... I thought the Irish were Protestants."

Boann gave a wry laugh. "Some of us are, like the English. That's actually what's happening right now. A war between the two. I am Catholic, from the South."

"The war's between the North and the South? I'm sorry, I have fallen out of European conflicts over the past year."

"Understandable, that is. Aye, right now it's 'tween Irishmen, but when we were there it was against the North and the British. Ye see, Catholics were being treated like shit, and like America and them, we wanted out of England."

"It must have been hard living in that."

"Yeah, well, apparently it's even harder now. People getting gunned and blown apart and shot up everywhere. I guess it was a bit like that before, but we were at least able to pretend that we weren't shooting our own people."

"We? I didn't take you for a patriot."

"You prolly din take me for a soldier either." She said humorlessly.

"Soldier?"

"Aye. I make a good lookin' boy."

Ardeth felt a piece fall into place. She was a trained warrior for an army of rebels. She gave proof with the one tattoo on her arm that was partly textual. Apparently it was one of two she recieved in the service. "Why on earth would you dress yourself as a man and join a revolution?"

"I dunno. Why do you dress yourself as a woman and join a band of ancient mummy-fighters?"

Ardeth gazed downwards at his dress-like garb, then back at Boann with a wide smile. She was returning that smile through the match that was lighting the cigarette she had just finished rolling.

"I joined because... I just did."

"Why did you leave, then? You left before the Civil War broke out, why?"

"We left nine years ago because... I couldn't really do it. I was trained, and sent out. We were trained as Guerillas, they called it. Guerilla war, where you attack and then fall back. Well, I attacked and fell back with a small bomb. It was my first assignment."

Ardeth watched as Boann swallowed hard. She took a long drag of her cigarette and shot out the smoke as if her mouth were a caliber weapon.

"I was to bomb a building, it was housing English soldiers and Northerners. Maybe a few civilians. I watched it go, you know, to make sure it worked. I had to make sure that it worked, right? And, it did. And I saw... bricks and glass, ripped from the inside out, mixing with blood and bodies. I saw, faces tearing with fire and metal and, sights lost among the... crash of one small ball of powder. A building ripped apart... Drostan and I left the next month."

Boann flicked a bit of ash onto her leg. It singed the thin top fabric, and then rested there until the wind blew it, bit by bit, away.

Ardeth was astonished by what she had just explained. He realized that he was inside, he was inside of her now and no mummy, no duty could scare him as much as that fact.

He was carefully crafting his next words when she, abruptly, asked, "Did you always want to be the chief? I mean, is it passed down from your da or..."

"Oh, um, yes." Ardeth's voice was a bit viscous for the recent un-use. "It's hereditary, but... no. No I didn't always want to be the chief. Neither did my father, though." Ardeth gave a small smile as he realized he was going to continue with the story.

"My father was born to the title, but he gave it up. He was a bit of a rebel, you see. Very uh... badass, is that right?"

Boann grinned and nodded.

"Right. He was a badass, and he refused his title, not wanted to conform to the old and, uh, 'repressive' ways of his father. Of course, this was after he had born me of his third wife. Very consistent, he was.

"So, when my grandfather died and I was about... six or seven, my father was granted his wish, and was refused the title of chieftain. It was given to his younger brother. After the... culmination of his choice was visceral, he saw that, in his heart, he did want to be his father. I think he was just... afraid to want that."

"That's very understandable... what I understood of it was," Boann said quietly. Ardeth looked at her to find that she was looking at him intently through a forest of thick, dry smelling mist.

"Understandable or not, he hated himself for it. Made my life a living hell, and my mother's..." Ardeth paused... "My stepmother's, sorry." He then continued.

"So I left when I was seventeen. I was given a scholarship in England to attend medical school at Oxford. They were attempting to create some diversity with the growing racism and independence movements happening here, in Africa. I was one of very, very few. It was a hard seven years of my life there."

"Seven years in school?"

"Yes. Nothing to the years you have to spend before that, right?"

"... Right, right." Boann said this a bit quickly, but Ardeth was too busy finding his next words to notice.

"But I worked very hard to become a doctor. I was not afraid to want to be like my father because I truly didn't want to be my father. Then... I left, in my second to last year I left and that same year my uncle died."

"You're father was next in line for the chieftain."

"Yes. But I fought him for it."

"What?"

"I fought him for the position, and won. I became chief over him. I am chief of all of my people, and he is still alive to see it."

Boann was silent for a moment. Her eye had become softer now, a bit sad, almost. Her shoulders were relaxed, pushed down by the hands of his words. Her next words surprised him.

"You're mother... she did not live to see it." It was not a question.

"No. She died."

"How?"

"... By dying."

"How did she die?"

"Childbirth," he finally said. His voice was loud and coarse now. Boann's smoke-worn words were scrapping against his brain and heart like fingernails. "She was thirteen fucking years old and her..." He was exhausted by the words. And Boann was still staring at him. He wanted to tear out her other eye at that one moment. He was furious at her, so furious.

"Her pelvis cracked," Boann finished for him. Ardeth was too angry to think about how she knew that. And Boann was too hurt to realize that she had said it.

"How did your bloody mother die?" Boann was silent at the question. She looked away, and flicked off the growing column of ash from her cigarette. Ciannait grunted in the background, and kicked one foot several times against the sand, creating even more dust around the one-eyed woman.

"That, love, doesn't matter." Ardeth began to say something along the lines of an argument, but was honestly too tired.

"You know, I think you did want to be like your father. You were afraid to want that, just like he was."

If she were right, Ardeth thought, than I could hit her right now and shut her up. But she was right... not that he would hit her, like his father might, but that he did want, somewhere in him, to be like his father. That was partly why he came back, yes. Partly...

He didn't respond, though. He was afraid his words would be irrational, and that he would regret them. They were silent for a few minutes, before he spoke again, inquiring to the time she spent in Egypt on her own.

"Well, I was seven, and Drostan was six, and an old Egyptian woman took us in. She lived on our floor in Cairo, and was the only one to respond to Drostan's incessant crying for Kell, my ma..."

"And how did Drostan come to live with your mother instead of his?"

"His mother, my da's sister, died. Consumption. And don't interrupt me."

"Yes ma'am."

"As I was saying," but Boann couldn't help but smile at Ardeth's devil-grin. "This woman took us in. She was a house cleaner, and money was... well, I didn't see an actual piece of Egyptian money until I came back about fourteen years later. Then, um..." Boann then, for the first time, acknowledged the dark side of her face. What she meant, he knew. Then, whatever happened, happened. "So, she sent us off, not caring where. I guess there's only so much a woman can take. We lived with my da in Ireland after that. Then, the war, we came back here, I was twenty-one and, well, I was able."

"Yes." Was all Ardeth said.

"Drostan..." She glanced at the sleeping buffoon, clutching his liquor like a doll. "He's not much of a person, but he's the only family I've ever really had. I suppose I am, to him, as well."

"Even if you are a bit hard on him?"

"Heh, even if."

Ardeth laughed lightly. He had felt the need to ask about her father, but felt that she might flatten out again. Make some Cryptic statement and then shut up. He didn't want her to shut up, so he didn't.

"Why did you kill that man, today. The one who had been shot in the head?" Boann asked this out of seemingly no where.

"Euthanasia is a practice among us. That man's brain had been partially destroyed."

"Partially?"

"Yes. His pons was still functioning." Ardeth spoke again more gently now, speaking of something that got his passions off of her one staring eye. "The pons is the part of the brain, here, in the back," and he demonstrated by placing his clawed hand on the back of Boann's neck, gently snapping a curl with a jagged fingernail and he brought it away. She did not flinch, yet her back seemed tense as any rock. "It is the part that keeps your primary functions going... um, the stuff that keeps your heart beating, your lungs working. So it can function without the rest. He could not see, hear or think, yet he was still alive. He would have bled to death, but, we believe in the mercy of quick death."

Boann gave a soft smile, "That's nice. I like that. I didn't know your brain had different parts."

"Oh, it has dozens. All with a different function." He then touched his hand to one part of her skull, digging his fingers in her thick, sandy curls to touch her pale pale flesh. "This is for speech. And this part, here, part of it is for abstract thought. And this is for seeing," he touched part of her forehead and let his fingertips linger. They were callous and stiff with sand. Boann didn't pull away though. He realized that she wasn't enjoying the contact, though. She was concentrating on the last section he had pointed to.

Ardeth quickly pulled his hand away. Embarrassed, he said, "I... have a book on it, actually. Well, it's a book on all of it, if you'd like to read it."

"I can't read."

Ardeth's face flinched. He was digging this hole very, very deep. "Sorry, I didn't know, I should have..."

"Assumed?" She caught him before he could save himself from digging another few feet.

"Yes, assumed."

At this, Boann gave him a blank look. Ardeth apologized, but it as no use. She was clamming up again. Saying only a few words at a time. He soon gave up, his shift was nearing and he would have to start the surveillance of the camp, relieving one of his men. He excused himself, and crossed to the other side of the camp. He watched as she turned her face profile to the direction he had walked in, looking after his tread. She then gave a deep sigh, through her back and shoulders, and stood up. She dusted herself off, pulled from her saddlebag another robe, and lay down beside Ciannait's feet. Then, to Ardeth's astonishment, the horse began to kneel. As she began to close onto the ground, Ardeth felt his feet begin to move under him. The horse was certainly going to crush Boann when it lay completely.

But it didn't. Ardeth stopped mid step as he watched the horse, with miraculous balance, lay perfectly next to it's sleeping master, it's body most likely keeping her warmer than ever. The last of her cigarette smoke drifted into the wind, and she threw the butt off into the sand, and then took the string of beads from her belt. At the conclusion of her prayer, which seemed to take a good fifteen minutes, she drifted off with a shudder of her shoulders.

Ardeth didn't know what to do. He had just met a woman, maimed, mean, and in some strange way, beautifully composed. Tragically so, but a beautiful tragedy. One he felt akin to. The only thing that was really driving him mad, was the way she looked at him. He could stand the meanness, the manliness the toughness. But that look, as if she could see the images within his head. As if she could tell him his own story better than he. He hated it. He spent the rest of the night figure out how to condition himself to somehow love it as much as the rest.


	5. Inbetween the Grays

Chapter 4

Ardeth had awoken the next day with a torrent of thoughts streaming through his head. He had had a dream within the half sleep he was able to force himself into after his shift. It seemed more like a hallucination; A woman with hair and skin an undistinguishable color was standing with her back to him. They were in the desert, the dunes shaping the landscape into a very bosom of the earth. Her dress was stained around her bottom with wet shadows, and as he neared, he noticed that her hair was also encrusted with the same dark paint. He reached out and spun her around, and found her face to be completely absent, as if blown off, and inside her skull he could see small bits of her brain still throbbing with functioning nerve-endings, while the rest was emptied pulp and flesh-dust.

He shook himself from the vision to see Boann calmly stroking the dust from Ciannait's coat. All of their cooking equipment was neatly packed away and set by the sooted logs to be packed onto the horses. Drostan, Evie, Rick, and two of his men were still asleep. The sun had just risen.

After having roused the rest, the seven travelers continued in the direction of the dig. For the entire morning and a bit of the early afternoon, Ardeth and Boann were wrapped in some of the most interesting and stimulating conversation that Ardeth had ever thought to have. They discussed with ease the ancient Egyptian and Celtic mythology, finding minute similarities, and Ardeth was very intrigued to find how intertwined the indigenous British religions were with early Christianity, specifically Catholicism. He wondered if the same were true for Egyptian faiths and Islam, but Boann very wisely pointed out that Catholicism was, for the most part, forced upon the Celts, and from what she could tell, Islam was much more by choice in the Middle East. (He corrected her, for they were not so much forced as strongly encouraged in Northern Europe. He was still impressed by her knowledge. For an illiterate street dweller, she kept a good ear for the – most likely, or at least assumed by Ardeth – pretentious conversations of others.)

Ardeth told her several stories about his family. As long as what he considered to be the rape of his mother – i.e., forced marriage and childbirth – was not mentioned, he was a very fluid anecdotal speaker on his families behalf. Boann learned that Ardeth had been raised by his father's first of five wives, primarily. A very graceful yet decidedly cold woman, she gave to Ardeth a sense of women that was absent in much of the desert culture. Not as much a respect as an understanding of how they might function. His father was the protagonist of several rather comical and adventurous tales, constantly getting in and out of trouble as a young man. Most of the stories of his father occurred before Ardeth was born, and must have been third hand accounts. Boann suspected that the rather unpleasant stories from his own childhood were not to be said out loud to her. She was content to know them from the inside.

But Boann gave away little of her own family. She spoke some of her life living above the bar her father frequented, but not much. Only that it was a place in which a "man was a man, and a woman a cunt." She mentioned her father briefly; he was, apparently, an ex-army official who had retired to a life of a construction worker in Dublin, and an insanely talented drinker. She avoided the topic with the same ease as Drostan had initially avoided mentioning Boann's defective eye, which was, again, well concealed. Her mother, however, made a respectively bigger appearance in her speech. Nothing too specific, but enough to see that she was spirited, and slightly crazy. Not one you would be surprised to find in Africa with two children and next to no money. But mostly Boann just listened to Ardeth talk. She would give small, but meaningly smiles. Her shoulders would sometimes shake with laughter without her face moving. Ardeth would catch himself in a gesture of concern at times, unsure if she were moving out of joy or if she were crying.

Possibly the most interesting conversation they had, as they had begun to fall backwards of the group, was on the subject of killing, once again.

"But don't you kill as many people here as you did in Ireland, just to stay alive?"

"Aye, but, that isn't as foggy, ye know?" Boann paused to catch her words, her hips bobbing with Ciannait's almost seductive trot. "It's more... personal, when you can see them and they can see you. Trust is established when you're not just blowing them up with bullets and metal for some foggy person's reasons. Even if it's from far away... and the reason, it's personal, and natural, it isn't something confusing and gray like freedom or faith. It's black and white, life or death. And while I know we all live in the gray areas, maybe that's why it's nice to be in the black-and-white ones.

"Death is a very important thing. It's an important part of life, and it's best to trust your killer, and to be trusted by them. Killing someone and making love to someone are almost the same thing to me, if that makes sense. If I know they are going to kill me, then I can trust them enough to kill them. You must always trust your killer, have faith in them to do it, and do it well."

Ardeth meditating on this for a very long time. Boann was a very head-on fighter, he could see. This could have partly been from her beliefs, but, most likely, from the fact that she had no depth perception to speak of. Headlong was the safest way to ensure that any distance was covered. It meant that she liked to get close, as she did with the bandits. As close as possible, even when she didn't need to. He could see how she would need this.

"I understand, but I do not agree. I think the exact opposite, actually. Death is worse when you are trusted..." Ardeth continued to think on the subject, his brow furrowing in a delightful way, Boann found.

"I still can't believe you were going to be a doctor," she said with a dry chuckle.

"Why not?" Ardeth said with a white white smile.

"I dunno. You're such a... a ruffian. You're too noble looking," she said, her words seeping from a decidedly forced smile. "And, ye know, how you must have to hold your faiths now between being a doctor and being a warrior of God and of ancientness and all things not-doctor-like."

"But I think they are very doctor-like. In both, I am saving people... I just happen to like saving people in a more... primitive way..." Ardeth did not elaborate on this point, but continued to explain the logistics of science and faith.

"Science is just as much a faith as religion, and as mythology. It's a leap no matter which way you go."

"But with science, there is proof."

"Dear Ann, I have enough proof of the existence of the supernatural to laugh in any scientist's face," he said with a quiet roar. "But when you go to a doctor, you have faith in them, just as you go to God, or a Medjai warrior, or an evil force of the Underworld, you have faith in them. It's very similar, you see."

"Yes, I understand. But, then do you believe in all 'f it? Do you have faith in all 'f those things at the same time?"

"Like you said, we all live in the gray, constantly. People were not meant to have faith in just one thing. I believe in, and love Allah, but I also believe that Horus and Anubis and Bast and Amun-Ra have a place in this world. I also believe that medicine does as well. People have God and love and science and wars that they honestly believe in them equally all at once; they were designed to. Just as you believe in the goddess Boann, and God at the same time."

"I always thought that you can't just have faith in God," Boann said. "I mean, to have faith in God, you have to have faith in yourself. Or else, how can you trust yourself to trust God, right?"

Ardeth laughed understandingly, "I don't know, Boann. It's all theory."

Boann nodded, and deliberated, before asking, "Why you 'came chief, is what I don't understand, I think. Why you did that over your father."

Ardeth shrugged after a moment. "Neither do I. A gut feeling, I suppose. Perhaps I lost one of my faiths."

Boann then took from her saddlebag Drostan's dark bottle of liquor. She uncorked it and took a long swig.

"Sorry, sometimes if I think a lot I have to drink, or else I won't stop," she said, rather cryptically. She did not offer him any, showing respect for the Muslim policy of obstinance from alcohol.

"Have you found, as a Christian, it hard to live in an Islamic country?"

"No. I actually have very little quarrel with other people's religions. Muslim, Protestant – I have enough trouble with my own faith to deal with someone else's..." she paused for a moment, as if sensing what he Ardeth was thinking. "I guess I joined the IRA not because I hated Protestants or even the English, for that matter. I just... hated the idea of not being free..."

"But the desert peoples..." Ardeth had almost forgotten her reluctant prejudice of traveling with them. In fact, he know realized that she had refused to eat their food, and had spoken little to any of the others from his tribe, save a few words to Adil, who shared a more tender fascination of the woman and her misfortunes.

Boann paused. Ardeth saw her face go soft and was unsure her veil could hold the skin on her face. "The desert tribes are... a different story all together."

But not one she would tell him that story.

At that point, Adil rode up with Drostan sitting behind him on his horse. The latter had a rather solemn face for his usual composure, and he began speaking to Boann in what Ardeth had discovered was Gaelic mixed with a bit of Arabic and English. He was rather astonished at their power with language, though, he knew language was one of the greater survival skills, and in the development of the human race, had become as essential to staying alive as eating.

After several minutes of speaking to each other, Drostan began to lift himself off of Adil's horse. Adil helped him with one hand to climb onto the back of Boann's.

"Oh, Ta , sir," Drostan said, and Adil gave him a curt nod, obviously glad to loose the extra weight.

Without much acknowledgment of Ardeth's presence, Boann began to ride upwards, towards the front of the caravan. But as she left, Ardeth saw Drostan staring at him, his left hand wrapped around Boann's waist, his other protectively placed on her upper thigh, giving him a poisoned look with his squished little sun-burnt face. Ardeth was slightly taken aback by the seemingly good-natured man's expression. He tried to brush it off, thinking instead of Boann's hair, and the world she must keep within it.

Around one in the afternoon, the group stopped at a large oasis to rest and eat. As Adil and the other's set up camp, Ardeth again approached Boann, who was unsaddling Ciannait.

"Sorry about Drostan. I think he was getting a bit flustered with your man."

"No, that's alright. I understand that you are important to him."

"Only because he thinks I need him. He's the kind of guy who needs to be needed, I think."

"You do need him," Ardeth said, without thinking. To that, Boann's eye became agitated, and stormed with dark clouds and waters. She was silent after that, and Ardeth realized that he had again crossed her dark borders. She was so yielding at times, it seemed. So eager to listen to what he had to say to her, to what he might have to give. So eager to be appreciated, and yet, her mind was unable to open to what her heart may have wanted. She was unable to let her body part for her lifepump to accept that to be accepted, one must be raw.

Ardeth attempted to salvage the situation: "I can show you how to use a sword now, if you like. You said you might like to learn..."

"No, thank you."

"Oh. Alright." And Ardeth fell silent, content to just stand there in the awkwardness, staring at the half-woman before him.

As Boann took down the saddlebags, a fairly large wooden frame came loose from underneath one flap and hit the sand with a shake. At the sound, Ciannait began to fret her legs about, nearly stepping on the frail fibre that covered the frame. Boann roughly snapped at the horse in the Gaelic mix to stop, and she slowly came to a standstill.

"It's almost like the horse understands you, sometimes." Ardeth remarked quietly.

Boann promptly slapped the horse on the nose. "In Ireland, white animals are thought to be fairy-folk... but if she is a mind-reading fairy, ye'd think she'd bloody read me Bodhran's mind!" And Boann gently pushed Ciannait's face from hers.

Ardeth picked up the fallen object from next to the horse's hoof. It was quite clearly some sort of drum.

"How would you play it?" He asked, drumming a few long finger on it's surface.

"I don't know, it was me ma's" Boann said. He knew why she was lying, though.

"You think I'm going to ask you to play."

"No, no I don't..."

"Yes you do, you're lying so you won't have to play."

"Oh please, Ardeth don't!"

"Ann! Come on! I know you know how! You wouldn't carry it into the middle of the desert if you didn't enjoy playing it."

"I carry it into the middle of the desert because it is all that I have ever truly owned." At that, she snatched it away from him. Ardeth's eyes met her one eye, and he watched her shoulders slump.

And Boann began to think there was something in them, something, something hidden in those thin thin skins of his eyes. She would play him, play him, she would play him a bit of her.

She walked him over into the thrush of the oasis, by the water, a ways away from the others. There she found a flattish rock on which to sit. She set the drum, and the strange, short stick she also carried onto it.

As Ardeth sat on the stiff and sparse grass, he watched as Boann began to peel off her many black and gray robes. She finally dwindled herself down to a white and thin blouse and black trousers. The shirt was slightly too big for her – possibly stolen – and the trousers well torn.

Her body was incredibly strong, though, that much Ardeth could see. She had a small waist that grew up like two flowers from one stem into her ribcage and shoulders. Her thighs were thick and strong through the cloth of her pants, and her arms were sculpted into bulbs and strips of lean meat. The second IRA tattoo was now visible, on her upper arm, a symbol of the Nationalist army. And what the pleasingly low range of unbuttoned buttons showed was that a very large tattoo also graced her chest and most likely, part of her back. Ardeth at first thought that it might be a branch of some sort, growing from her back, over her left shoulder and over her sternum in a single line. But upon closer observation, realized that it was a snake, done in black, fine detail.

The last thing she discarded was her veil. The thin strap covering her eye was even more pitiful than he remembered from the night before. Bits of scar flesh hung out of it like a harlot's breasts in all directions.

When she relaxed, her breasts fell in an attractive concave to her ribcage, and the dark of her nipples was slightly visible through the worn shirt. Her bountiful curls were being pinned up by the undulating muscles of her arms, and the dark stains of sweat were sheering out the fibers, making the dark bushels of hair under her arms also visible through the cloth.

As she finally situated herself in a comfortable state within her own skin. She sat down with the leather-skinned drum on her lap. The leather was cut very thin, and the frame was not very deep. A wooden bar stretched across the back of the drum, by which she would soon hold it propped on her leg. She took the double sided stick in one hand, and the drum in the other, her collarbone flexing and protruding beneath her thin skin, as if a prisoner trying to escape as she did so. She was so thin... He could take a scissors and snap her ribs, one by one, to reveal her heart without much effort at all, he though.

"Um..." she began, brushing a stray curl from her increasingly reddening face. "Me ma first taught me how to play when I was wee, and she learned it in 'er village, and I got taught more when I was older living on the island but in truth I'm no good. But, um. this is an old folk song, and it's meant to be played with a fiddle and whistle, and a war drum as well. But, I'll make do..." She very solemnly picked a spot on the ground to focus her one eye on. It was a beautiful eye, in truth. Beautiful, as if a small indented hole out of which a diamond once popped out of, poorly glued.

She began with a strong thud of the stick against the skin. Ardeth had an idea of how it would be used, a similar sort of drum existing in the Middle Eastern cultures, only without a drumstick. But how she played it was much different, and how it sounded was as well. Her wrist glided over the skin of the Bodhran as if tracing the lines of a lovers legs, his hands, the veins under his eyes. The stick bobbed in all the right places under her skilled hand as if barely touching the surface, yet producing the most complicated and invigorating rhythms Ardeth had ever heard. It was a muted sound, not meant to be the greatest component out of the arrangement, he thought. But it could be powerful when she wanted it to, and yielding at her same whim.

After several minutes of the this trance-like observation, she began to sing. Her voice was thick, but articulate in its sounds. It was deep and powerful, and rather off-key as she let slip each ancient word. She was rocking now, as she played. Her entire upper body rocking to the rhythm of her drum and her singing, all the time focusing on the one spot in the sand.

They must have been their like that for at least twenty minutes, the song seemingly never ending. Perhaps Ardeth simply never wished it would end. He felt like he was making love to her, right then. Just by watching her play. She was, at that moment, more naked than if she were balded from head to big toe.

When she finished, Ardeth wasn't sure if he should clap. Do you clap after you make love to someone? Boann wiped the sweat and tears from her face with the back of her sleeve as Drostan stepped from behind a stunted tree.

"You brought out Kell's old drum, eh Annie?"

Boann nodded as Rick and Evie also stepped out behind Drostan.

"Oh that was lovely, Boann," Evie exclaimed.

"Ta," Boann replied quietly.

"Won't you play something else?"

"No, I think I'm done in."

"Oh no you're not," laughed Drostan. "Play us a jig Ann, lass."

"No"

"Oh come on!"

"Oh, please do, Boann," Evie chimed.

Ardeth was silent, content with whatever decision she might make.

"I'm not playing a fucking jig Drostan." To which Drostan gave his best puppy-dog face, which, Ardeth had to admit, was quite good.

Boann surrendered, and kicked into a much more structured and jolly pattern of beats. To this Drostan took Evelyn's hands, much to Rick's chagrin, and began to dance with her next to the water. Evie giggled and Drostan cackled, and despite himself, Rick smiled at seeing his wife smile. Ardeth also chuckled at the sight.

"Oh God I do love that music. Makes me sick I love it sumuch."

Drostan spun Evie around himself and kicked up his heels as he continued to talk through stunted breaths.

"I used to play fiddle with 'er, in the bar we lived above, and Brady'd sometimes come in wit' the whistle or sing or such, before 'e died and all. But then I had to sell the fiddle."

Evie gave a sympathetic "Oh!" in between steps and giggles.

"Yes'm. Had to get the money to bail out Boann's da."

Evie continued to dance, but she had lost a bit of mirth at this. Ardeth's ears had also perked at the mention of Boann's father.

"Damn sod got 'imself locked up. Threw a chair at a man's head for lookin' up Annie's skirt while she played on the stage."

He again took Evie by the waist and spun her around the axis of his body. Ardeth's eyes had driven themselves headlong into Boann's face, which was becoming as blank as the desert sand.

"The lad died the next day, if I remember. Concussion and all."

Boann was staring at her spot on the ground. She was staring so intently, Ardeth thought she might burn her way through tot he Underworld. He was staring at her, a mixture of anger and pity and love mixing in his head. But she said nothing. Just stared at her spot. Her hair quivering as her head shook with anger, shook with dread. She was shaking with anger and with dread.

Drostan and Evie kept on dancing. Rick soon joined in.


	6. The Wife of Brady

Ardeth's teeth were as white as the sea in which her black-jewel-cutout-cornea swam as it looked at him with what he would dare to dream could be adoration. He was smiling so big he thought he might shame the moon's own grin as Rick and Evie continued to dance in the night around the roar of the bonfire in swirls of dark charcoal smudges across the star-sewn sky. Boann was playing her drum with her hand now, in a more Middle Eastern style, while Adil had filled a long empty gourd with sand and rocks to create a second source of rhythm. Drostan was humming and hollering out the melody as the other two Medjai tapped their feet with enjoyment.

It was nighttime at the oasis they had stopped at. They had decided to stay there the afternoon and night, take a longer break, enjoy themselves. Rick was most adamantly supportive of this. In truth, he felt that he was so rarely in a time in which he could enjoy his wife's full company, and this was the chance, he thought. Evidently, Evie did as well.

But it was Boann who seemed the most relaxed. She had let her veil down after the O'Connell's caught her earlier that day without it; a sign of trust almost as touching as the fact that she had eaten their food, and was partaking in their music now. Ardeth was completely unable to discern why the woman had lived int his country for so long, served as a domestic to their bourgeoisie, and, apparently, had learned the patterns of their music and their lands, yet seemed to be uncomfortably unaccepting of them.

But she seemed to accept them now. Perhaps it was the liquor, though. Drostan had brought out yet another bottle of liquor (they have more alcohol than water in this trip, Ardeth thought), and the O'Connell's and Drostan had swam their share each in it. Boann was happy to partake of her own bottle, which Ardeth was not surprised to find out was much stronger than the other.

Yet instead of drunk, Boann seemed normal, almost. Normal in the sense that she did not seem to constantly, almost vapidly upset. As if their was an empty sadness within her; a sadness that was felt to deeply it had been sucked of all it's substance and was simply left as a involuntary constant, like blinking.

Drostan was dancing now, and the rest were looking with gleeful anticipation on their faces as he coaxed Boann to stand. She protested colorfully, of course, but she was gone enough to stand up and shuffle her feet a bit. Her movements were rigid, but powerful. Ardeth enjoyed them. They were attractive movements; attracting movements. The very sexuality of dance shining through he hard exterior of the very pious steps of the Irish. Drostan spun her around and around to the shake of Adil's instrument until she fell, finally letting her drunkenness fall through.

She fell soft on the ground, her thickly maned head falling near Adil's folded feet. He laughed with a sparkle in his eyes. Ardeth had noticed that Adil had taken something of a liking to Boann. He was the only other Medjai, besides Ardeth, who had spoken to her conversationally.

Adil had lost his daughter at the age of eight, some year ago. Ardeth could only think that his fascination with Boann was some sort of disembodied affection for any young women. Boann was several years older than his daughter would be now, were she alive, and certainly didn't share a feature to speak of, but the older man's eyes seemed to soften in a paternal way when around her.

After Boann fell the rhythms stopped with a roar of clapping and laughter. Ardeth noticed small crows feet drying out the corners of her eyes as she laughed. She was missing a few teeth in the back of her mouth, and the rest were yellowed and some slightly crooked.

But Ardeth thought he had never seen another woman look so beautiful. She had changed her shirt into the less form-fitting but much cleaner black tunic she now wore. It was painfully obvious that it was borrowed from her cousin, as it hung in near drapes from her torso. She had tucked the slightly torn shirt into her pants in a futile attempt to hide this fact, but it only bulged endearingly beneath the waistband.

As she sat up, it did not pass him that she made sure to scoot herself to sit closest to him. She was adjusting her makeshift patch now, ensuring that as much as could be covered was covered. It was amazing how little he noticed the asymmetry of her face now. He wondered if she noticed it on herself at all. She had a truly thin face, her cheekbones protruding from her face, pushing her flesh to white summits and creating razor-tape shadows in the hollows. Her hair hung down in miraculous ebon curls. She smelled of cigarette smoke, sweat, leather and liquor. Ardeth shifted himself to meet her approach. They sat very close as Evie spoke.

"God, I haven't danced so much in years." Rick clung her soft body close to his own as they sat across from Ardeth and Boann, Drostan sitting very much near them.

"Aye, I 'aven't danced at all much since we left Dublin," replied Drostan, taking another swig of the liquor. He was on his way to being utterly, unbelievably smashed.

Boann's flushed face betrayed her exhaustion, and she took no words from her inhibitions when she leaned her forehead onto Ardeth's shoulder in a futile attempt to balance herself. Her breath crawled down his arms pleasantly, causing hot shivers along his strong arms and back. Years of training in two practices of complete control and a drunken woman's breath can shatter it all.

Adil noticed this closeness, Ardeth saw. But his face seemed to grow even more mirthful at the almost awkward contact Boann had made. Drostan's face, however, showed a different reaction.

Jealousy.

"In fact, I dun think I'd seen Annie dance since Brady died. Have ye, Ann lass? Since you'd dance with Brady?"

Boann's joy faltered as she turned her head to look at Drostan. She was smiling with intoxication, but a different kind than before. A rageful sort of intoxication; embarrassed, almost.

"That's about the seventh time you've mentioned a person named Brady, Stan. Who is he?" Rick asked as he also took another drink.

Drostan didn't look at Rick. Nor did he meet Boann's heedful gaze. He was looking strait at Ardeth, his eyelids slumped over his grey-green eyes.

"Brady? 'Adn't Annie mentioned Brady-boy?" Drostan gaze then shifted to Rick and Evie's. "Brady's Boann's husband."

Ardeth wasn't sure the reaction of the other's at this. He was only aware of his own. His shoulder was cold now with the absence of Boann's head. Her face was flattening out again, growing heavy. She looked so old at that moment, a few more years slipping with every word from Drostan's mouth.

"Brady was a fine dancer, too. Wasn't he Annie?"

"Yes," her voice was barely a whisper as she responded. Her eye was focused on the fire, the black of it rejecting the reflection.

"Oh then, Boann, you _are_ married?" Evelyn innocently asked with a silly smile on her face. There was surprise in her voice as well, and she did her best to hide that. More... unattractive people that Boann are married every day, she would have thought.

"Was," Boann replied, her eyes meeting the other woman's. "I'm a widow. Fourteen years one."

Evelyn's face looked a bit taken aback. In the journey, she had come to assume that Boann was only a few years older than Rick, if any.

"Fourteen years... that means you must have gotten married when you were..."

"Sixteen," Adil replied. Ardeth would spend the next few seconds trying to figure out how he knew her age so well. He would conclude, later on, that she must have mentioned it.

"She was fourteen, actually. That's right, in'it? Fourteen?"

"Yes, I was fourteen when I married Brady. He was... um, twenty-three I think. About." Boann paused to think nervously. Her voice was so quiet at that moment. Quiet, childlike almost. "No, he's that age when he died. Um, twenty-one then, when we married."

In truth, Ardeth, Adil, and the other Medjai were not terribly shocked by the age. Not in the way Evie might have been. Ardeth was simply shocked that she had not said anything about it – naively so, he would admit. It did make sense of her surname, though.

"Yep. Brady was a good dancer he was." Drostan added with a sting

Ardeth's voice was a bit coarse for his words when he asked, "Arranged?"

Drostan, irritatingly, answered for her. "Nope. 'Fact, I think Diarmuid was a bit furious at it, wasn't he Boann?" Drostan spat the unfamiliar name slightly, annunciating the "t" in a hard verbal stab.

"Aye, he was."

"Wouldn't come, would he?" Drostan continued. "Then again, you guys din get married in a church, d'you?"

Boann's face changed now. It shaped itself into a slightly offended expression. "Yes we did, Drostan. Da didn't come, but Bray's folks were there and it was in front of a priest, good and like.

"Brady was the best Catholic I knew of," she finished with.

Rick snorted. "Sorry, but I don't think there is such a thing as a good Catholic."

Ardeth was afraid Boann might be agitated further, but instead she grinned quietly.

"I know. That's why I said the best I _knew_ of." Rick laughed heartily at that.

"How'd he die?" Ardeth asked, trying to mask his concern as curiousity.

Drostan's knowing smirk died at that, a sad face replacing it.

"Killed. Street brawl" was all Boann said – not with disgust or hatred, but with genuine sadness.

Boann took one last swig from her bottle, before setting it down. She stood up without a word, her rosary at her waist brushing against Ardeth's cheek as she turned and left with a slight wobble. Drostan made a successful attempt at changing the subject and livening the mood. But as one of the two younger Medjai left for his shift at the watch, Ardeth also retreated to find Boann taking her nightly smoke by the water.

"Did you love him?" He asked as he approached her seated back. The edges of her curles glistening the moonlight like the blades of knives. He did not sit, but simply leaned against a tree behind her. Ciannait was drinking loudly a few feet away.

"No," Boann said with a sad laugh. "I din love him."

Ardeth moved, and sat beside her silently. Her skin looked sunken and tired as the water danced patterns across her half-face.

"Security then?" Ardeth asked, unsure of how much security she could get with a man like that.

"Yes, security. As I understand it, your families must sell over to security at around the same age."

Ardeth nodded, unsure if he should be upset by the statement. "Sometimes, yes. But..." he paused, wondering if he should be so blunt at this point. "But you were poor, and I don't gather he was rich. Wasn't staying with your father and stepmother a better idea?"

Boann didn't answer. She took a long, heavy drag of her cigarette, coughing lightly as she exhaled.

Ardeth was silent a moment, thinking. He chuckled softly. "I just can't imagine you as a wife," He said, echoing her statement about his short medical career.

Boann's lips crackled with a small smile at that, not taking much offense in it. She knew he didn't mean physically. "Why not?"

"I don't know. Just, doesn't seem very you." He laughed lightly. "Did you want children, at all?"

"No. No children."

"Now, I can see you as a mother." Boann was taken slightly aback by that statement. Ardeth wasn't quite sure why it was true, either. But it was. He saw bits of a mother in her. The way she seemed to take care of Drostan, even though he thought he was taking care of her. She let him think that he was, and that it exactly what a mother would do, he thought. But he couldn't see her a mother to the babe of a drug-addict.

Boann laughed a bit to herself, amazed at the statement. "No lad. Certainly'd be a bad mother. Got the genes for that. Plus, been pregnant enough to not actually want the kid itself." Boann's mouth twitched. The alcohol was taking control over her now innate secrecy

Ardeth was sadly silent at that. He continued with what he impulsively gathered from the statement, "That shouldn't deter you, Boann... Uh, many women have consecutive miscarriages, but it doesn't mean they can't ever bear a child."

Boann smiled mirthlessly, twirling her cigarette numbly between her fingers. "I've never miscarried."

Ardeth's eyelids lifted slowly. "But... you're a Catholic."

Boann paused tensely. Her eye was marble now, hard as stone. "So was he." She said simply. "So was he."

She knew he thought she meant Brady. She knew this, she did.

"In England," Boann said, ensuring that he didn't think this for too long. "you were to be married, weren't you?"

Ardeth was now completely aware of Boann's seemingly other-worldly ability to determine the exact events and feelings of a person. He attributed it to some sharply honed instincts.

"Yes. I was engaged for a year." It was the one time Ardeth had ever considered marriage. It was also what had brought him to the conclusion that marriage, and indeed any real attraction to the opposite sex, was not an "instinct" he would ever choose to react to. Until now, of course.

"She was lovely?"

Ardeth paused, then took a deep breath. "Yes, she was very beautiful. Her name was Lucy."

"Did you love _her_?"

Ardeth laughed anxiously. "Um. I'm not sure. I thought I did at the time. I've actually never liked the idea of women as romantic figures. My stepmother was always so... goddess-like, I never saw them as objects of love, just as objects of protection and... pain, perhaps." He had partially seen Boann as that. Truthfully, he had not even seen her as a sexual being until he realized she was married. Perhaps it was the wound, or perhaps it was just him. But now, when he thought of it, he could fit her easily into his folds, given the chance. He never felt that way about Lucy. Sex had always been expected. He was expected of enough in his life to want to be married, he decided.

Boann's face was pleasant as she spoke, softly curved to a default expression of contentment. "Did you leave her because she was white?" She asked, her words hard against the softness of her mask.

"No! No, not because she was white." In a way, he might have been lying. He wasn't sure. Perhaps he wouldn't have worded it the way she did.

"But you broke it off long before your real reason for leaving occurred, didn't you?"

"How do you know I had a 'real reason'?"

"Didn't you, though?" Boann asked, her thick Arabic lapping at his growing nervousness.

"Yes, I did." Ardeth took a long breath in, and then out. He wasn't sure if he had ever tried to put this into words. It made him realize that this "real reason" would be impossible to ever tell her. "It wasn't because she was white. It was because... I didn't belong with her."

"You didn't belong there."

"What do you mean?"

"You didn't belong there." Boann said, matter-of-fact. "You went there, expecting to enjoy the 'advanced-ness' of Europe as opposed to the backwards-ness of the desert. But you couldn't. All the time you wanted to be closer to what they would call an animal again, right? Like your father before you, you were trying to fit into something different, trying to be your own person when in fact, no one is their own person, right? We're all someone else's baby. But you couldn't stand it much. You didn't ride their buses, their cars. You wore your hair long, kept your beard. You're mind wanted that stimulation, but your fingers... they were longin' to sift through the sand again."

Ardeth looked ashamedly at the ground. Once again, she had punctured his surface with the ease of a clairvoyant fingernail. "In truth, they are just as primitive as the Medjai and all other tribes are supposed to be." Boann shifted her weight uncomfortably at that statement. Ardeth continued: "They just hide it a bit more. That wasn't my home. That's not why I left, but I knew it all along. I knew that this was my home, despite myself." Ardeth looked at Boann with tender brown eyes, soft with the nakedness of his past. "Don't you feel that way about here? Egypt, this desert that you seem to be so attached to?"

"No. This is my home. This is were my purpose is."

"But what about your people?" Ardeth asked naively. And for the first time he watched Boann's anger fluster. He wasn't sure if it was wholly his words; he would have liked to have attributed a bit of it to the alcohol.

"My people... my people," she said harshly, but very quietly. "My people piss pieces of their brains out overtop their brothers' vomit. My people start wars because of pieces of paper that, if they were honest, they could shit on and not shed an eyelash over it. They just get angry to get angry. My mother served beer to whankers with cigarettes up their arses and sticky stubs in their pants for tuppence, and then fucked the first bastard to greet her with a hello instead of a hand on her arse. Those are my people? You're damn right those are my people. But that wasn't my home. This is my purpose. I will die in Egypt when it is no longer my home."

Her rage, he observed, was a subdued one. One that took power in it's breath rather than in it's volume – in it's putrid air, not it's sound. Her anger was thick and wide beneath her skin, behind her eyes, both of them. They were both silent for a while. Ardeth was unsure if his next gesture was a wise one. His hand crawled and snaked to hers, brushing her pinky finger gently. It was so cold that he didn't hesitate to take the hole hand within his. It both chilled and heated his palm as he held it. It was so small and thin. Calloused and raw skinned and pale. Boann was staring at her hand in his when she said:

"Brady wasn't a bad man, Ardeth. He was a good man. He was the best man I knew of." She said, and he assumed that the "knew of" was as applicable as the same words were when she spoke of him as a Catholic.

All Ardeth said was "Okay," before falling into silence.

They sat there for several minutes. Ardeth was unable to decipher the moments that were passing. Not as a doctor, not as a warrior. Not as a primitive person, not as an advanced person. Not even as an ancient person.

Ciannait rustled her mane, splashing water onto her nose. In the moonlight, she truly did look like a fairy creature. She was the fairy, and Boann was the witch. He wondered who had captured who, though. Had Boann captured the fairy of her mother's memory, or was her mother's spirit keeping her here? Bearing her into the vastness of a country that had offered Kelly solitude, and then tore her away. But how? What was it that made Boann hold so tightly to Kell's red hair and green eyes. Her bleeding thighs and hollow face. Hollow face...

At that moment, Drostan came crashing through the foliage to where the two hand-lovers sat. Boann sighed heavily as his drunk-beyond-belief eyes barely rested upon her face.

Drostan stumbled over to Boann, running a slobbery hand over her scalp. Boann pushed him away, standing and relinquishing Ardeth's hand.

"Eh, Annie... uh... Ann, honey, sweetheart..." Drostan was vertigo, stumbling from side to side, fluid dripping from his nostrils. Ardeth watched, at first amused, as Drostan walked stupidly to where Boann now stood. He reached out a hand and took Boann's face in one graceless move. What Ardeth was unable to anticipate, Boann was painfully aware of. She drew away quickly as Drostan tried to kiss her. When he approached again, his lips flopping onto the side of her mouth, she pushed him away as if blowing him back with the bullets of her hands. When he stood up, still laughing, Ardeth saw, with no amusement, the quiet anger of before beginning to build in Boann. Quiet in voice, but not in action. She flew her fist into Drostan's face, flinging him to the ground like a soiled rag. Ardeth stood up quickly to help the drunken man up, and instinctive gesture.

Drostan held his hand before his mouth as blood began to dribble from inside of it. Ardeth held his shoulders and examined his mouth. Drostan spit blood into his hand, in which lay one partly blackened tooth.

"Boann..." Ardeth said in shock, despite himself. Ardeth had been in his share of fights, seen his share of broken tooths, jaws and noses. But he couldn't understand this. He didn't want to understand that someone who still looked so beautiful to him could do something in any way ugly. He thought it absurd to think this. However beautiful she was to him, her actions were only reflecting her face. She was ugly to the rest of the world, to the sky and even to her horse. He would later realize that it was foolish, and selfish, of him to expect his vision of her to reflect in her every aspect.

Drostan had begun to cry. Pitiful sobs of uninhibited pain, emotional pain. Drostan's uninvited kiss had been shunned. It was clear now to Ardeth; Drostan was in love with Boann.

"I'm... sor... sorry Ann... I'm sorry..." Drostan said through a numb tongue.

"Boann, the man's just drunk. He's just drunk."

Boann stared at Ardeth, a fine mixture of love, regret and anger in her eyes. "Just drunk? Who the fuck do you think you are?"

Ardeth was still holding onto the crying man's shoulders in an almost embrace. "I'm the man who's..." Ardeth stopped himself, unable to find words that did not amount to "I love you".

"I'm telling you that you've done wrong. You can't solve everything with hitting someone." He realized now why she asked who he thought he was. At that moment, he himself couldn't tell who was saying such things to her.

"You're a man to bleeding tell me I've done wrong!" Boann nearly screamed. She was now gaining the attention of the others in the camp. "Sweet Jesus, Ardeth. No wonder you've got the balls to pardon your own duties if you'd pardon everyone." She swept herself over to where they stood, her presence casting Ardeth's limbs into hard rock.

"But don't you fucking bother pardoning me." She seethed into his ear as she took Drostan in her arms, far more tenderly now, bracing him up with the skill of one who has done this many times before. She led him to his tent, soothing him roughly with her voice and hands, leaving Ardeth with an etched face, unsure of what to think of himself or what he was feeling.

Adil was standing behind a small shrub. In his tired, old and ugly eyes Ardeth could see his fate's reflection. He needed to know. He needed to know why she knew so much, yet would tell him so little. He needed to know what she looked like without clothes on, without her hair on, without her guard on.

Without her patch on.

Before Ardeth attempted to sleep, he tried to enter the tent to apologize to her for his words. But when he reached it, he heard from within the strain of a strong voice made to be soft, and the wrinkles of crying costing the voice it's quietness. It was Boann singing, and Drostan crying above it. Ardeth gently pushed the flap aside a few inches to see in. She was rocking him back and forth, back and forth, singing softly in the thick tongue of her ancestors to him. Like a baby in her arms. A drunk, bleeding and in love baby in her one-eyed arms.


	7. SelkieMother's Salt

The night had passed with Ardeth's eyes still open, as if each lid were the same magnetic direction as the other lid. He could not close them after what could be considered his fight with Boann.

It was her eye, when Drostan kissed her. It was that flatness, as if her it was made of velvet, and in one spot it had scratched to a glassy finish, but if you stood at the wrong spot of it, the light would not catch the glass. All light would fade from it. He had stood at the wrong angle that night. Drostan had shifted his vision to see the blackness of it. Depths unestimable.

But dawn was breaking now. The lights were catching his own soft chocolate eyes. A red sunrise to mark the red sand with its red hand. He felt nothing rustle for several minutes as he sat, back to a tree, staring at the water. The slow ripples of life giving textures to the wavering heat of the sun. As the water began to settle under the sun's scrutinous eye, Ardeth could hear sand shifting under light feet beyond the foliage.

And indeed, Boann was outside of the tent she and Drostan had shared that night. She looked freshly groggy from sleep, and Ciannait, who had waited outside of the contraption the entire night, lapped at her face, washing the sleep from her skin. She was wearing a thin, yellowed and threadbare women's camisole, sweat staining it beneath the arms and breast and gathering below the summits of her nipples. The snake that slithered from spine to sternum coiled around her reddening shoulder. Her shoulders were slightly hunched now, as if not quite as awake as the rest of her. The patch lay wide across her face, making her look almost dashing from a distance.

She pat Ciannait's nose, brushing the sand away from her nostrils and eyes to the surprising permission of the horse. She combed through her mane with her fingers, intermittently smoothing and ruffling the sand from the white white hairs. Her hand ran over her spine, down her legs, under her belly, carefully smoothing away the froth of the desert from her fairy-kin's skin, her darkly haired forearms clumsy and dirty against the light of Ciannait's coat.

She then moved to her own hair, turning her waist over itself and letting the hair flip upside down, she shook and shook until the sand no longer came out. She then tied it back at the nape of her neck with a thin thong, the straps of her eye covering so tight they were pushing a few strips of hair up higher than the others.

She quickly moved to the ground, then, rolling her neck around itself a few times before bracing herself horizontal to the sand on her hands and toes. She began with a good fifty push-ups, doing them quickly and with what looked to be ease. After the first fifty, she moved to one arm, and then the next. She then tucked her toes under her bottom and rocked up onto her knees energetically. She stretched each arm it's given time both behind and in front of her chest before standing upright.

She then gave a few loud smacks to Ciannait's rump, to which the horse obediently folded her legs underneath her, and then fell from her knees to her side. Boann then sat about legs-length from the horses weighted side, and scooted her self up to massive ribcage. She tucked her bare feet under the horses chest, and began a series of sit-ups. Ardeth lost count of how many. He idly wondered how far the woman could count. Probably pretty far. She lived in a pub, and most likely worked there some time as well. Would have had to count money and glasses and pints. As a domestic, as well, she would have to be able to count the number of china to be washed and the rooms in the house. Boann seemed to gather what she needed from life, and only what she needed. A good set of arms and legs and enough knowledge to get by...

But then, he would wonder, what the purpose of her frivolity was? The rosary, while important, was not a necessity, he thought, to prayer. Particularly to one who seemed as conflicting about her faith as Boann was. The tattoos, the drum, the knowledge of ancient mythologies and curses of more than one origin. No, Boann took not what she needed, but whatever she could. Finding bits and pieces, here and there. Trying to fill an empty space...

After Ciannait was standing, and Boann had concluded what appeared to be a morning routine, her attention was brought to the closed-flap tent. She ducked into it, and came out with a painfully hung-over, blubbering Drostan over her arms. She helped him to walk out of the tent, and began to make her way to the water of the oasis.

It was now that Ardeth made to move to hide himself better. Silently, with the stealth of a large cat, or a long serpent, he moved further in the sporadic foliage of the oasis. He watched as Boann nearly dragged the moaning Drostan to the water. She sat him on the sand, close to the water, while she tested the temperature, which was still a bit frosty from the night cold, he gathered from her reaction. But none-the-less, Boann stood Drostan up, who was beginning to attempt to speak, and with the roughness of a mother, stripped away his wind-beaten shirt. Then his belt, his shoes, his pants. She bent over to pull the pants over his feet, then knelt down to undo his undergarments, being careful to face the side of his thigh, as not to get a face-full of either extremity of his lower torso, all the while responding mutely to his numb, nearly unintelligible apologies for the night before.

He looked like a lost child, shivering in the cold of his own sweat and piss. Naked, thin and flaccid under Boann's unashamed hand as she led him to the water, nodding to his each and every request for forgiveness as if a sin-weary priest entertaining the little-boy sins of a thirteen-year-old child.

She helped him into the water, herself still fully dressed – though, for the water, now quite indecently dressed – and proceeded to rub his upper arms with her strong hands in a half-hearted assurance that the water would not be so cold for long. Ardeth watched as she took a small scrap of cloth and began to wash away the vomit, sand and blood from his face, chest and legs. She dunked his head gently into the water, and let him clamp down on her arm as she pried out another threaded tooth from his mouth. As she washed his back, he stood with his head resting on her thin breast, his fingers sorely stroking his gapped mouth.

Once he was clean, she brought him out of the water, and sat his naked form on her cloak, she took from a satchel from Ciannait's saddlebags a bottle, and handed it to him. At the sight of it he vomited onto her clothing, and Ardeth assumed it was in fact, more liquor. He eventually took a few gulps, and seemed to relax, the alcohol dumbing down the pain in his mouth and head. He lay down in the sun to dry himself off, still clasping his throbbing head.

As her hand reached to feel the watery fluid on her shirt, she suddenly realized that her own grime was building to an uncomfortable thickness over her skin. She stripped off her pants to her undershorts, checking with little care to see if anyone was watching, and, with little grace, thumped into the water.

She did not splash, though, Ardeth noted. In fact, her movements in the water made minimal physical impact. She seemed to glide, thigh high now, in the clean and slowly heating water. After scrubbing her arms and face, chest and, awkwardly, her nether regions, she slowly glided to her knees and scooched a bit deeper into the water, until she was about chin deep. It was now, in the warm, womb-like water, that she relinquished her patch. Ardeth could not see from that distance the marring of her face. But he could see something different. Something decidedly less strong than the Boann he had seen. He no longer saw someone who would let go of the well water into a river of knowledge, but one who would try to patch it back up, for fear of the wrath it would bring. He no longer saw a woman who would defy nature to ensure that the father-god loved her and his beast was born upon her; but instead, a scared little girl with some soap and water who would do anything for nine months to be washed away in a day.

He touched his own face, feeling the grooves in which an inked needle was pounded, making roads to be mapped by fingertips in the sand by a tree, watched from a distance by one small eye. His own marring felt fresh after a full three years, the memory of the pain still present. He wondered if her pain was present in her absent eye. That awful pain... but not that awful, he had said. Why not that awful?

He could see her face contort, though, even from that distance. She was crying. Pushing water out of her mouth and crying, the water rippling with the reverberation of her chest and cheeks. He then remembered a story she had told him, about the Celtic mermaid. In truth, he couldn't tell you much about the Anglo mermaid if you asked him, or any other nationality of one for that matter. But these were called Selkies; seals that can take their skins off to reveal a beautiful form of a woman. He didn't know what a seal looked like. He had a vague memory of seeing a walrus or sea lion with Lucy as a zoo. Boann had said they were sad, sad creature. Sad eyed and gentle, with powerful cries. Hunted for their skins and fats.

Well, she had no fats; and her skins were less than desirable. But he could imagine her as one. A slick, graceful seal swimming through waters and sands and air. One eye delicately plucked from the socket by a fisherman's hook; or perhaps in the struggle to escape his net.

Or perhaps it was a seal that had charged head long into that hook. Let it scrap the skin and the jelly and the retina strait out of the scalp. But for what? Why? To be ugly for the rest of her life? To escape her Selkie-mother's beauty? Was she unable to shed her skin, reveal round hips and a plump ass and fire in her hair underneath the tough leather of her outside?

She ran her hand over her face, letting the water wash away the salt and the sting. Her hand avoided completely the right eye-space, passing over the bridge of her nose to her wide mouth.

She stood up and got out. Dried and dressed herself as well as Drostan, who seemed to be slightly more coherent, though his mouth was still a bit slack. The others were rousing, and Boann was dressing her composure into what Ardeth could now see was her idea of presentable. Protected. Cold, distant, violent. Like the moon, perhaps. Or like a goddess. Like a woman who was hurt beyond hurt. Hurt numb.


	8. The Slack Mouth

This chapter is short. Just a bit of filler.

I want to say to anyone following the story, I have made an important change. Brady's death is now different. This is how it was before I changed it to the drug idea, but it just didn't flow in the future chapters. So I suggest reading chapter five over again, or at least part of it, perhaps.

Thanks for the reviews!

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The others had roused, and prepared to continue on the trek. As Ardeth helped Rick and Evie to sit their camels, he was surprised to find Drostan approaching latter's beast, swollen mouthed and expectant.

Ardeth eyed the man wearily. Having discovered the man's intentions the previous night and tonight, he felt a little more than uncomfortable facing him. "Is there a problem, son?" The patronizing tone of his voice was not lost on Drostan, although that was surprising, considering his condition.

"I need to get on Evie's camel," he said, his words slurred and muffled by his aching gums.

"What happened to Boann's horse?" Evie asked, unsure of inviting him to ride with her the last day and a half.

Drostan looked pained at having to attempt to explain, and Ardeth quickly decided to go the sourc.

"She's Gone," Boann said, still not looking him in the eye as she strapped on her belt. She hadn't looked him in the eye all morning. His breath was crackling and catching like a net in his chest every time he saw her and she wouldn't even look him in the eye.

"Gone? I saw her just this morning..."

"She ran off." She said, non-chalant.

"Ran off?"

"Ardeth," She turned, cool anger bursting through her sun-burnt nose. "Ye 'eard me the first time and ye'd 'ear me a second. She ran off about and hour ago, dunno where she gone." And after a few seconds, she added, "She ain't my horse, after all."

"Then how shall you ride?"

"Adil offered to take me."

Softly surprised and amazingly frustrated, Ardeth walked off without another word.

And indeed, Drostan rode silently on the back of Evie's camel, even helped her in steering it a bit (though she was most likely pretending she needed the help to cheer him up). Before they had left, Ardeth had given the man some salts for his gums and a clean piece of cotton cloth, explaining that some antibiotics might be beneficial upon his return. Drostan seemed to understand, but Ardeth wasn't sure, trusting the man's intelligence less and less each day. In all honesty, the man's affection for Boann had mustered some jealousy within Ardeth as well. He assumed that the fresher the feeling the fiercer the envy – He honestly could say that he shared Boann's first instinct the night before, he simply felt that it would have been best not to act on it. And never one to easily give into preconceived judgement, was quick to help him as much as possible with his injury.

But not just Drostan's emotions were effecting Ardeth, even Boann's riding so close to Adil was creating some reaction from him. She rode in back of him, her face completely veiled again, as if she were figuratively shutting him back out of her. She was certainly still angry. Ardeth had no true talent with the temperaments of women. He could understand them at times, but rarely could he find a fitting counter to them.

Even though it felt nice to see the old man smile so brightly, his dull brown eyes sparkling with a new sense of endearment and amusement, it was still disheartening to see earned in a few hours what took him two days to earn from the woman; trust.

Night fell on the quiet travel of the seven companions. Ardeth had spoken little; a bit to the O'Connell's, but nothing much of substance. He had thought of Boann much, unable to help himself. Hot and cold images flooded his head, sometimes returning to his dream two nights ago, other times drawing him to her face. He found himself several times attempting to render her face whole again inside of his head, but every time found it seeming far too awkward in it's symmetry, finding her incompleteness to be a much more natural picture.

As they set up camp once more, only a good four miles from the dig site, Ardeth found that it was Drostan with whom he conversed most of the evening with, rather than Boann.

In truth, he was not a bad man. A bit off center, perhaps, but not bad. Ardeth was reasonably sure that he thought the same about him, and that their hatred for each other was completely impersonal. Just over a woman, was all.

"I had wanted to apologize, about last night. Boann was right to hit me for what I'd did." Drostan was not unaware of Ardeth's eyes, fast held by the back of Boann's head as she sat several meters away from the dying fire. The others had already retired for the night, and Ardeth was keeping watch, though his watch was mostly over her.

"No, she did not have that right. But thank you for the apology."

"You know," he began, lighting up a cigarette. "She gets nervous about things like that. I guess growin' up the way she 'ad to, ye'd expect it, right? But, uh, we do, eh, love each other. She's just not in the like to be touched is all."

Ardeth said nothing. Drostan smirked slightly, assuming that he may have scratched a surface fo the leader's interior.

"You know, we aren't engaged, but we've always sort of agreed that we'd be married. I mean, we're all that we've got," he said, echoing her earlier words. Ardeth gave a somber nod, not entirely believing this. Like Boann had said, Drostan liked to think he was needed. And, he could expect, he must have been in a way. He was the only one not to have left Boann, thus far.

Drostan brought to voice what Ardeth was, at that moment, thinking, "I've been with her about her whole life. I mean, you know, through all the shit with her folks and my folks and all." He tapped his ashes off of his leg where they had fallen. "And I was there, when it happened." He pointed to his eye with a quick cutting jut of his finger. "I'm the only one 'oo can understand."

He meant to brag, Ardeth knew. He meant to show off that he was more equipped to handle Boann's conspicuous troubles. But what he had really done was give Ardeth another piece of her, bring him a bit closer, simply by knowing that she hadn't been alone when it happened. She hadn't been alone, and she was in Egypt. She must have been twelve, around, once he'd done up the math. That was all he knew. That, and that it had been cut.

But Drostan continued: "And when something awful like that happens, and another person's there, it kinda brings the two of ye t'gether, I guess, a bit. Brady'd married her, but he din love 'er. Not like I will, when we get married. I know no one else will, just me." He stated confidently. But Ardeth was numbing to his boasting, instead intent on drawing out of him as much as possible given the opportunity.

"You had said before, though, that it was so awful. Why do you now say it was?"

Drostan, who's head was still a bit tight and mouth slack, thought hard to remember having said this. Upon remembering having said it, he then thought hard to remember why. Once this was established, the numbers totaled with his thinking on what he should say next.

"I guess what I meant is that... for me, it was the most terrible thing to happen in my life," and Ardeth was slightly touched that he would reveal this tender confession, his face maintaining it's stony composure while his heart squished a little. "But for Boann, it really wasn't. I mean, she'd do it again, I think. Maybe. I dunno, maybe it was the worst, but I dunno if anyone else but her'd think it was. You know, other's say other stuff was the worst. And maybe she'd agree." He paused a moment, his thoughts deepening within his swollen mouth. "I think Kell dying was the worst. Maybe Boann being born was the worst. I dunno. I couldn't tell you how far back the worst one goes.

"But I'll tell ye this. Diarmuid used to say that a lass's face was the much less ugly arrow pointin' to 'er loins. If ye asked Boann she'd say that was true, even fer'er."

At that Drostan stood and walked off to his tent. Ardeth was unsure of what the last comment had to do with the high point of Boann's pain. The pieces were still far to jumbled to put together at this point.

Ardeth settled down to an uneasy shift at the watch. He hd hoped to see Boann pray, and then sleep. Perhaps approach her sleep-limp body, stroke the soft hairs on her arms, the circumference of the bulge of her chin. But instead, she just sat there, a few meters away, every now and again moving her head slightly. And when he awoke the next morning she was no longer there, having risen before sunrise, as usual.


	9. The Pretty Name

Just an extra disclaimer, this is the really gruesome chapter. If you feel like you'll be terribly offended by sexual and physical violence, rather unflinchingly described, don't read.

Again, artistic liberties taken.

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With a relatively leisurely star-off that morning, they would not reach the temple until late afternoon. The sun beat down drunkenly upon Ardeth's well swaddled head, though the bright fists still penetrated his weak sense of protection.

Brighter than the sun, he could feel her eyes rip bits of his flesh from beneath his clothing. Only for seconds though would they rest long enough for his suspicion to alert, darker than the sun and hotter than the sand; black heat blazing small grooves into his smooth flesh.

Drostan's words had unsettled Ardeth. Would she truly marry him? As he thought on it, it was her best bet in life. Better than any life he could give. Racism and custom would prevent her from obtaining any substantial place in the presence of his tribe, let alone as a permanent resident. And to even think of marrying her was foolish; she would never convert, nor would he. And then, simply considering the reasons why she wouldn't be able to make a life for herself with him was ridiculous as these thoughts would be put under the assumption that she would agree to be with him at all. She had shown slight flirtation and one brief, half-hearted moment of mild romanticism with him against what seemed to be a deep-rooted prejudice that he knew the strength of on the basis that he had felt it's breed before. Most are unable to live a life without feeling it. For all he knew, she was toying with him out of an enjoyed hatred of his people...

Yet she knew who he was. Medjai. And she knew his loyalty and was honoring of it. She knew his mythology, his language. She might have even respected them. Then why? Why was she in the desert now? Why would she travel with the Bedouins she indiscriminately hated?

No, but how... how was the question of Boann. Never why. For how did she know so much about him. She knew him before she'd met him, it seemed. She knew his body and his mind and his heart and most of all, his memories. She knew him with an old heart, a heart that has lived many lives at once, it seemed. She was wise, he thought. And not for being illiterate; he knew many a man without that knowledge who would be in every way more intelligent than the most prestigious student at Oxford. It was a wiseness that was unfamiliar in a woman's eyes, in an adult's eyes, in a child's eyes, in a dying man's eyes. It didn't belong anywhere. He didn't know where it belonged. It bereft him of logical conclusiveness.

As they reached the temple, its ruins towering like dust-smothered building blocks, long abandoned by the gods, the sun fell heavier in the sky. Evie excitedly began unraveling her tools, while Adil made the relatively short trek to the nearest watch post of the Medjai to alert them of where they were, and that they would stay there the night.

Evelyn was the only other up besides Ardeth and Boann by nightfall. She was still working away inside the temple. The others were inside tents, beneath fallen pillars, taking refuge in the large arms of the ruins as the sun grew small against the night's gigantic eye.

Boann was sitting on the ankle of a fallen and mostly eroded statue of Bast. Her cigarette made her looked like a torch pillar that had just been snuffed under a strong wind, the smoke flying northward, to an unpleasant green. It had taken until long after Adil had returned from alerting the watch for Ardeth to summon up the courage to speak to Boann again. His feet felt light as ribbons of smoke as he walked across broken stone and sand to reach her slender, rigid back. He sat, a bit away, more on Bast's calf than her ankle. His dark eyes peered over tattooed cheekbones at her profile. Her good eye was facing him, and if it weren't for the band of cloth that wrapped around her forehead still on that side, he thought she might have looked normal.

"May I?" And her eye darted to where his fingers were pinching the air by her mouth. She loosened her lips for him to slip the cigarette from their sanctuary. As the thin paper and tobacco left her hot mouth, he could feel it's sad shiver and sympathize.

As he coughed heartily with the inhalation, he was repaid with the reaction he had hoped for: a short, taut laugh from the woman. They were silent for several moments, her cigarette fading in between his coarse fingers, shying down to nothingness in his hand.

"Do you remember," she said, her voice sounding dreamlike, spreading onto the air like a thick layer of charcoal on parchment. "... Do you remember what you were like before you killed someone for the first time."

Someone... not a person, but a someone. "Yes, I do." He did. His first someone.

"I don't," she said, peeling off a callous from the crevice of her right hand. He noticed, futilely, at that moment that she had no scars on her hands, nor indeed anywhere else but her face. Those chicken-wire tracks pounding their way down her cheek, jigging and fiddling from beneath their eternal bandage.

"Why don't you tell me about her?" She asked, almost innocently, pleadingly.

"I don't know what you're..."

"You do, you do, you do. Goddamn you Ardeth you know what I'm talking about. Tell me before I break you're bloody skull." Her voice was a soft scream, the softest scream Ardeth had ever heard. He complied, his mind in too much pain to understand anything hiding beneath the curtain of her words.

"I was a year from graduating, getting my license. I'd stayed in as long as I could. In truth I was... afraid to become a real doctor. I was afraid..." It was hard for him to say, but he had a feeling she already knew that he was afraid, always afraid and that not saying it was pointless now. "So I began my apprenticeship much later than others. And, um, a young woman, who had been thrown from her horse at her home... it was her birthday and, the horse was a gift, she was riding it at her party. It threw her down, broke three ribs and her collarbone." He swallowed so hard he felt his tongue go the whole way down. "The collarbone is usually very easy to reset and heal, unless it's too close to a lung, in which case one would have to operate. I was only meant to reset it, but I soon found myself in an emergency operation with only a temporary license. It was going to puncture her lung."

"So I went in. And as I was, pulling," At this he began to motion with his hands, clasping with difficulty a tangible, yet still imaginary bone. "– well, or pushing... um, both, I suppose – the collarbone away from the lung and... um, the..." he breathed in deeply, and was unsurprised to find her chest still with held breath. "The... I was pushing and pulling and trying so hard to save her breath... trying so hard... and when the bone snapped under my... guiding, guiding hands, snapped completely off, the pressure sent one of the snapped ribs strait into her heart. She was killed instantly..."

He felt it hot on his cheek. His pallor was so white with fear that the blush was visible in the darkness of the air at being to vulnerably exposed. But he was there now, and couldn't bother with blushing tears.

"It was her... fucking birthday and I... I couldn't tell her parents, I didn't tell them. I made someone else. I followed protocol I... did what I was supposed to do but, um, well. A freak accident, I guess. That's what they called it. I called it an accident by a freak."

He felt his heavy chest lift with the containment of a withering crack of tears, and he let the water rush back into his sanded cheeks.

"You came back, then."

"Yes."

"You came back because you thought that you really were a killer, like your people. You were meant to kill others, not save them. Kill them to save them not save them to save them."

Ardeth felt himself choking. "Doing it for a greater good, instead of for seventeen year-old girls who fall off their shiny new horses."

He felt his composure return like a new coat of plaster over his entire body. Fresh enough to let his judgement loose. To let it be aware and able to question.

"You know. You knew, why did you... how I don't understand. I don't understand how you know it all. How can you know my head so well, you barely know me."

"Yet you loved me."

"I still love you."

"And you barely know me."

"Shut up!" And he stood with a powerful displacement of air. But he didn't walk away. He just stood there, towering above her like a statue. Perfect on the outside, but all broken and molded and eroded and replaced bits on the inside. Break him, and his heart and lungs would cut your hands.

"It gave it to me. I know what's in Evelyn's head, Drostan's, Rick's... I can see bits of Adil, his daughter. I know everything in your head. Every cold comfort of your stepmother, every empty glance of your father because it gave it to me."

"What? What gave you this?"

"The Horizon. When they were taking it out, with a knife, all of it out to save, the Horizon gave me it's sight for mine."

Ardeth stared down at her, and then at the line where the land made love to the stars. A place forever unreachable, an imaginary place. But for an imaginary place, it was certainly able to see all of us as real things. No matter how far or close, up or down it could see so very well the lives and thoughts of us all. A bit like God, he thought. Was God just a horizon? Or, as she said, the Horizon? Cutting through to see the insides: Of a burning building; a frightened husband with a little child bride; a mother who gave up everything that wasn't stolen from her...

Yes. She was right. The Horizon did give her it's sight. Like the very natural sensory compensation – where the nose becomes stronger when the eyes become weaker, or the ears – made supernatural. A third eye was opened. A third eye dancing in the Horizon over the heads of those around her.

"Boann why are you here? I can't read your mind, you have to tell me the old fashioned way."

"I'm here for her."

"You're mother?" He said, still standing, but now gazing down at her, the whites of his eyes standing out against his night darkness. But she did not look afraid. She stared up at his, sandy tracks of tears razing her left cheek. It was a trick of the stars, he told himself, that made him believe they were also on her right.

"Yes. I'm here for her. She died here."

"Bedouins, right?" He said. It seemed so obvious now, he was unsure of why it alluded him. It was four words that brought it to him. He felt like they were the most important four words in her thickly curled head. "Tuareg?"

"No. As far as I know they're hardly Muslim. No, they're out for bits. For, uh, tokens. Human bits."

Ardeth nodded. He had encountered such bandits before. Taking fingers, hands, feet, whole limbs. Ears and eyes and hair and testicles. Keep sakes. Sacred, in a perverse way, to them. Human loot.

"Me ma, she..." Boann was looking more and more distant. She was staring at his feet until he sat back down beside her. He took her eye then in his, took her back to him.

"It's just me, Annie. It's just me. I want to know. I must."

"I know..." She answered, sadly. It was a while before she continued. "She brought Drostan and I here, and she and Diarmuid were still married and all..." Boann's face seemed to flash with an unfamiliar color. She continued with a mirthless glee on her face in a different direction then she'd started. "Me da... He wund't good to 'er. He wund't much of a good man. She was a barmaid at the pub, all good and seventeen years old when she got pregnant with me. He was a regular, and, see, 'e had these eyes. These brilliant blue eyes like ice in water, like holes in a frozen lake or flowers. Really bloody blue. She just... she married him, though, ye know. Catholic and all."

"'e was real bad to 'er. I remember once, sittin' on the floor. I must've been three'r'four. She comes walkin' out of the bedroom and she's limpin' all good and like. But ye see, Diarmuid'd never smack much. He never made bruises. She'd just be limpin' out cause he was a hard man to take on top ya."

Boann stopped. She looked like a line drawing right then. Something two dimensional and strait out of a medical book. Ardeth wasn't sure if she'd continue. "And, uh, she locked me in the closet with her. She got in the tub with a bottle. I din know it was soap in it at the time. I just remember staring at her foot which was danglin' off the side of the tub. I heard the washing noise as she washed 'im out of her inside, but I was starin' at her foot the whole time. Da din scare me back then 'cause he'd never touched me. Not once. I think he told me I looked like a horse once, which was comic 'cause I'm the spittin' image o'him, but other than that I dun think he spoke to me either. But he touched her. And she washed 'im out while he banged down on the door and was screamin' and screamin', 'Kell, don'tchya dare don'tchya dare do that Kell.'" His voice was softer when it came from her mouth than her own was. "And I know now what she was a thinkin'. She was thinkin' 'bout 'er name, and how she'd never let anyone call her Kelly 'cause it was too pretty. Well, now she really wasn't pretty. She wondered if they'd ever call 'er Kelly now... I'd have, but no one else would have...

"I din understand when we left. But we did. Kell was still married, but by the time we got to Egypt on da's coffee tin cash she din care no more. She found the first bloke to marry her white white self and converted. Very bad for a Catholic to marry more than once in a life. Diarmuid even waited until he at least knew she was dead to get married again. But she married 'im, and then she... two years after we moved there, she left." Boann's face had a blank smile spread like dripping over her skin.

"Left?"

"Mhmm," she said, all-too-cheerily. "She left Drostan and I on the floor and went with Rashid to the fucking center of the desert. She said she'd be gone a few days, taught me how to work the gas stove and left. She left us there. She taught a goddamn seven year-old to work a stove and left...

"She din come back, ye see. Weeks later and she din come back. A few years after that Rashid reappeared, good shaven and everything. I saw 'im in the market in Cairo. He told us what had happened. They wore red, 'e said. And they let him go. He said 'cause he wasn't white. I think he gave her up, though, to save himself... I always said I'd kill him after I'd kill them. I never got around to killin' 'im though..."

She took a long drink of her own mouth. Her eye jumped in it's time wheel, skipping over a hump, a mound of flesh. Ardeth perceived the jump after she began speaking again, but was unsure of whether to call her on the skip in time or not.

"When we went back to Ireland, I was all scarred up. I was bandaged and feverish and sick..."

"They sent you off before you healed?"

"Aye. As soon as I was conscious she sent us away. If I'd a been healed, there wouldn't have been much reason to kick us out, would there have been? No. No there wouldn't have been."

The cigarette was down to the flesh on Ardeth's fingers. He flicked it away with a seething of his teeth at the burn before letting her continue.

"I was all messed up in me face, but Diarmuid took us in. He was livin' above the pub still, and had married a woman named Brigit. She'd had a baby by him by the time we got there. Livin' with him... Sweet Jesus... we tried to get out. Drostan, it was easy for 'im. He was bloke and he wasn't so fucking ugly as me. But me... I... Da din love me. I knew that because of the Horizon. I knew 'e din love me at all. One bit. I disgusted him." He wasn't sure if she was choking on tears or hatred. He inwardly laughed as he realized that tears and hate must be the constant struggle in her heart. He was seeing that now. "I had to find another way out."

"Brady."

"Aye. Brady. But Brady din love me neither. It was hard 'nough for 'im to marry me. I think 'e 'ated me. He was a truck loader and 'ad no money. I couldn't even move in with 'im, cause he, he had no room. Had to stay at me da's still. So, it was useless... and I think," she paused, as if unsure how to make these words fit. It was almost as if she'd never told anyone this before. "I think he tried to get killed, you know? I think he was goin' for it. 'Cause 'e was married to a sick freak-thing like me and 'cause he couldn't help. He couldn't help me, and he couldn't do it 'imself... so 'e walked into that gun... Everybody made fun of 'im and they made fun of me."

Ardeth tried to touch her hand, but she drew away. She was focusing on her boots and her shoulders were twitching ever so slightly

"They made fun of us, and I let them. I let them tease us and fuck with us. Just like I let Brady think I was a bad person and just like I let 'im die. I let 'im go out there and die like that. I let 'im die. Just like I let them fuck around with us. Just like I let him fuck me." She paused, her mouth fat at the place somewhere in between crying and laughing. "I let him fuck me."

Ardeth's breath rose slowly, then crept from his chest in an almost painful motion. He was staring at her almost perfect profile when he asked in a meek mockery of his last words, "Brady?"

"No. Diarmuid."

Ardeth felt any movement in his eyes pause very, very slowly. He let that name take register, remembered that it was not unfamiliar and then, against his own control, clamped his hand against his mouth. 'So was he. So was he.' Oh God...

"Me da. 'E din love me. I knew that. But when he fucked me it felt like he might love me. It was the only time he'd touch me or talk to me." Ardeth was unable to speak as she continued, rambling with a tearless eye. "I think he'd dun it cause I din look like 'er. He wanted me to look like 'er and be like 'er and I din, I looked like 'im. But I wanted to look like 'er, too.

"Brady'd tried to stop it but, he din have the money for it, or the power, really. He thought he'd stop after the marriage but he din and I din even though, you know, I hated it, I really really hated it. But Brady din know that, bless his heart, he din know. He thought we were all goin' to Hell, and we were. Bless Brady's heart, he din want to go to Hell. He just din want to go to Hell."

"Your stepmother," Ardeth said finally, his voice partially regained. "Why didn't she...?"

"You dun think she tried? She tried so hard but she couldn't leave him, and with me and the baby with 'er. Helen was so small when it started, it started a month or so after I got back, I remember, 'cause I was still 'avin' to wear a bandage. But Brigit wasn't me ma, she couldn't do what Ma did.

"Drostan..." Boann's eyes softened, now. "Drostan did his best. Between Diarmuid bein' good to 'im and bad to me and between 'im wantin' to help and wantin' to do what da was gettin' to do all along, he did his best. He got me in the IRA. It wasn't till then, eighteen years-old I realized what this was doin'. Realized that this wasn't what I wanted. Realized the difference between wantin' something and lettin' it happen. But I still..."

She still wanted that love. Ardeth could see that. She still needed that love from her father.

"But war wasn't for me. Not that war. That was not my war. My war was here. And still is here. It's here."

Her eyes then took on the darkness of determination. Ardeth knew that color well, it was a bright black that made all the world look blurry, save for what you are truly trying to find. That, he knew, was always crisp and clear.

"I'd tried once before... but I'm different now. I've been different for nine years, and I'll be different for nine years more. Until they kill me this time." She closed her eyes, a sick bliss taken on in her words. "They'll kill me here, or I'll kill them, then kill meself. Either way, I won't be losing another eye."

"That's how you lost it. You were thirteen..." He nearly suffocated on the number.

"Yes," she said, her voice whimsically wrapping around her own head.

"The token tribe... they took your eye as a token..."

"No," and at that, he face turned to meet his, her eye burning with a sad hellfire and angel's wings both at once. "they tried to. I moved, though, I moved my head until there was nothing left but a bit of skin and a lot of scratches...

"I 'ad meself a bloke back then, when livin' with Hadya. He'd taken me maiden from me and had read out loud to me my father's response to m'ma's death, and on my thirteenth birthday, 'e gave me a nice shiny knife. After Rashid'd told us about me ma's killers, I got to lookin' around. Got to talkin'. They'd come into Cairo sometimes to sell the good hairs for wigs and such, or other hard loot – jewelry and cloth. Well, they came, and I intended on buying from them revenge.

"But I couldn't get at 'em. I tried but... I was too small. Drostan was so scared. I think back on it now and I shouldna brought him with me but I did. And when they closed in on me, when they opened up my eye to take it... I just kept my head movin'. I didn't let them take it. I wouldn't let them take it."

"So they tore it all out. Bit by bit," Ardeth said, entranced by her face at this point. He couldn't get away from it, this time. A warrior, a doctor, a lover, a human, a horizon... whatever he was and whatever she was, they were meant to touch.

"Yes... I lost it... I don't know how I survived. Drostan tells me a man made them leave. He made them leave all by himself, and then took me up to him. Took me to the hospital. I was unconscious by that point." She gave a weak smile, her hand shaking as she pulled out her matches. "And he was right. That was my first... sight. Was the man. I dunno who he was, but he took me in 'is arms and until recently I've never been held that way before." The unlit cigarette betrayed the trembling of her lips. Boann had never said so much to someone before. She'd always been told things, not the other way around. Told memories and moments, thoughts and feelings. Why she would confide in him would have baffled him had he not by that time been assured with every hair on his body that she loved him, too. He was never given the sight of the Horizon, or of whatever it is that she thought gave her this gift, but he could see that much at this point.

With a trembling hand she attempted to light the cigarette. When she was unable to, he watched her finally break down. Tears fell from her shaking eyelid, and her lips – lips that were now beyond perfect to him – curled into terrible shapes. Curved shapes that at once resembled both the blades of knives and the manes of horses.

He quickly took her face in his hands, acting on instinct now. He felt he had the courage to towards her, now. A wall had been broken between them. A well had been shattered and he felt wet to the bone with the water.

She was shaking her head at him, her eye unsure. Now, it was unmistakable that wetness was falling from beneath the bandage. Her entire face was so wet with the tears and the sweat of the exertion of her confessions. He held her hands so tight he could feel the blood-filled flesh pulsate over the tops of his own hands. He just didn't want her to move away again, didn't want her to close up. He would never make her fix that well.

"Why do I feel this way Ardeth?" Her voice crackled like a great stone breaking under the weight of her tears. "I can't do anything around you. I don't want to do anything. I just want to lay there and know that you're layin' there, too. I've never felt that way before. Even when I wanted to tear off my whole face it hurt so much, I always needed to move. I should want to kill you... I should want you to kill me..."

"I didn't kill your mother, Boann," he said, his voice a rumbling whisper against her good cheek.

"But I did!" She exclaimed, her spittle uncontrollably flying onto his face. "I did kill her. I drove her out. She's the first person I'd ever killed. No mother leaves a seven year old child there for nothin'! It was me she wanted to throw in the desert! It was me she wanted to wash outa her and she should have. If you'da seen her, Ardeth, you'd agree. She was so beautiful, and I'm so ugly."

"No, no you're not."

"I am... and I hate that, and I hate her. I hate her for 'aving me and for bein' so much prettier than I'll ever be. I was out to avenge myself that day. To avenge her on myself. I wanted to face who she faced and kill them like she couldn't so that I could be better than her, do something right from her for once. I was avenging myself and taking vengeance out on myself for hating her so much. I didn't expect to kill them, I still don't. I just didn't want to live knowing that I can't help but love the one person I've ever hated so much in my life. I still don't... except..."

She was squeezing his hands back now. Hands that had killed, and loved, and banged a drum. Hands that were taking down, block by block, a well in which salmon swam over each other's slippery bodies, trying so hard to get free. Silvery skinned fishes, pink pink fishes lashed on top of each other like scarflesh, splashing water over the sides, just trying to get out.

She was sobbing so hard now, Ardeth felt his own salts tickle his cheeks, felt his own face contort. He couldn't help himself. She felt so human at that moment. She did not feel like a fairy or a selkie or a horizon or a well. She was so human, so breakable at that moment. He realized that he was honestly afraid of breaking her. Since becoming the leader of the Medjai, he had not felt so afraid of breaking someone.

It hurt so bad, but he knew he had to feel it. They were two people running away from things they had to except, punishing others for the hate they felt for themselves. She was crying so hard, she was crying so hard.

"Oh God Ardeth, they took... I saw, and they took her parts. I saw it with my own eye like I had been there. Like she was callin' out to me... and she was callin' out. She was callin' my name and it wasn't a pretty name, at all. At all... and they took her privates. They took her nub in her cunt away after she was dead. And..." Her entire body was shaking against his. He could feel his arms clasp around her wrists. "And... oh God oh God oh sweet Lord God... they took her hair... Ardeth they took her hair from her faceless body. She had red hair... her hair was so red and they took it. They took it and I love you..."

And he met her there. He drew her in like a dying breath and forced her face up to his. He pressed her lips so hard he felt they'd smear all the way up to her hairline. He pushed them open and kissed her with a fury of a frightened horse, kissed her with the force of a gun. She tasted like spice, like salt and sand. Her skin was drawing all the moisture out of him and he would have given it up ten fold just to feel that close to her for a few seconds more. He felt he could break open his chest and take her into his ribcage, keep her there forever. Trapping her once more into a land that lacked anything familiar to her own body and mind. Keeping her there just so that he could feel her heart beating against his bones.

But she pulled away from him, leaving his breast cold and his eyes salted. He couldn't keep her there. She was free of him, and he wouldn't have it any other way.

There was one thing, though, that could bind them. Not in a cage or in a prison, but in trust. She began to tug at the knot buried deep in her hair, her arms shaking as she cursed quietly at the knot's stubbornness. After several minutes of watching her try to untangle the knot from her hair, he softly 'shh'-ed her, slowly bringing her arms down to relax. He put his hand on her head, bringing it's black top to face his chest as he patiently undid the knot, and then letting the cloth drop to her lap. He kissed the top of her head, his lips landing on a thick layer of curls. Before lifting her head, he began to feel for her face. He felt her cheeks, her nose, her mouth, the softness of one eyelid, and the taut, leathery texture of the other. It was incredibly soft, pillowy towards the right corner, where the blade had ripped it so deep that the skin had to rise like bread over the bone in order to create enough tissue to correct the damage. Then it dipped, like a dune into her socket, where the nerve must have finally popped, and the flesh simply had to sheet over the raw hole and nerves left there. It traveled down her cheek and up to her unruly eyebrow, wrinkly and punctured in places, where stitched were obviously placed.

He lifted her head, finally. Stared into her unflinching face. Her face was incomplete, he thought, like a later Michelangelo, the right eye never chiseled into the proper detail. The marble left in it's own jagged formation, he could see the wet places where the tear ducts still sweated moisture from those pours in an attempt to lubricate an imaginary eye.

They stared at each other for several moments. One beautiful person and one ugly person; one king and one beggar; two warriors, two killers, two believers in an embrace and a kiss against the thin line of the Horizon...

* * *

The girl looks small, flat chested and sun burnt. Her two black, beady eyes stare in their wideness at the bustling flurry of the market. Peddlers and beggars and thieves bump and shove in a dance of violent appreciation. The boy is much younger, his head blonder than the sun, with freckles dotting his nose and cheekbones.

Her eyes can only see red. Red robes, red robes, where are the red robes. She has planted an ambiguous smile on her face that is betrayed by the fire in her black eyes. Her hair, cut short and in fine black curls, frames her cherubic face. Red robes, red robes, won't you trod on my eyes, won't you dace until I cut away your feet.

She runs at the sight: seven red robes, seven red head coverings. She pushes the fat woman out of her way, the sallow man is shouldered from her view. The boy follows behind blindly, just following the tan and sweat-stained dress of his cousin.

She ducks at their feet, making a deep slash in one ankle with the little silvery knife, silvery fishy knife. She smells the Nile fish being sold as she races away, drawing them into a line for her to slaughter down like chickens or cattle. One by one, she can see it in her head. She climbs the small hill, into the alley way, the market fallen somewhat below her. They are following, and closely behind them, her cousin is screaming as he tries to keep up. He is calling, "Annie, Annie," and she thinks how she hates that name. How it is far too pretty. How she'll make sure no one calls her Ann or Annie after this. After she kills them, and her mother's memory to boot.

But they are big, she thinks. But I am bigger. They are strong, but I am stronger. Am I not stronger? She cannot move her arms now. But I am stronger! She is stronger than they, yet now she can't move her legs. Stronger, stronger! Mut mama said I'd be stronger than anyone, just as long as I wanted to be. I want to be!

"Little girl, that was a nasty thing to do to my friend there," His Arabic is a hiss and slur. He signals behind him to where the seventh limps up the slope, dragging his right foot behind him. Drostan is standing behind the corner of a building, his head peaking around to see with fearful fascination the fate of his cousin, uncertain of the gravity of the situation. She'll get away, he thinks. She'll get away and we'll get some ices and it'll all be okay.

She can't move her head now. One of them it holding it still. Her black eyes dart to the man's face, the one hovering in front of her. She thinks about how it doesn't look like he has a neck or body from this angle, just a head, swivelling and swerving like a snake. Hissing at her, his words wetting her small frame.

"You have fascinating eyes... They aren't blue, like others, are they? They are so black, and so big." She feels the wind brush her arms as the knife he pulls displaces it. "They are very pretty, very pretty."

She can't get away. She will die. I will die, and so will Kell, she thought. Mama's gonna die with me now. It's either them or her, one or the other will kill the bitch, and it'll be over.

She keeps her eyes open, wanting to see that face as it plunges the knife into her, wanting to spit in his face in one last dramatic gesture. But instead she is looking at a dagger's point, right in front of her right eye. Her brow furrows as she tries to decide why they are going to kill her in her face. What are they doing? What?

"Pretty eyes don't belong to mean little girls."

Her mouth is covered, she feels the knife slip under her skin, cutting below the eyeball. Drostan is screaming with his eyes, pasted to the floor where he stands. Boann realizes that it is gone, it will be gone. Not her mother's killers or her mother's memory, but her sight. She is going to loose her eyes. As the pain seers through her tiny skull, they dart out. Out, out, out into the Horizon. She focuses on the strip on reddish whitish light, where the land makes love to the sky. The Horizon is telling her something. It is telling her what they want. They want her eyes. Did they take her mother's eyes? She couldn't let them do to her what they did to Kell. They must do something else, something different. She must be braver. They can't have it. They can't.

"Hold her head still, dammit. Stop her from moving... Shit, shit!... I broke it... What do you mean you broke it?... I sliced it down the middle is what I mean... Oh for fuck's sake... Well I'm getting as much of it as I can but she keeps moving... Her head is too strong... Make her stop!"

And they do stop. She sees them stop. A man has cried out and at his image they drop her to the ground. She can see the top of her head, but every time she tries to touch it, it is just as far away from her hand as before. She sees the man, who walks calmly, deathly through the throng of running red robes. He is scooping her up. She cannot feel it, but she can see it.

The small boy flings his body against the tall man's black clad leg, beating it and telling him to let Annie go. The man gently strokes the boys hair, letting his fingers show their size as they encompass his skull completely. Drostan calms, and takes the man's offered hand, as he walks him quickly, with the girl in his arms, to the hospital.

She sees it all. Just as she sees her form, lying in a white bed in a stone room with wide windows. They don't pay much attention to her. Her eye is bandaged and a nurse from time to time wipes the sweat from her brow. Hadya visits, cries, and leaves. She feels as if she is sitting on the ceiling. She is sitting comfortably above them all, but she cannot discern how far away she is.

The boy keeps kissing her mouth, telling her he's sorry and crying hysterically. He kisses her at least twenty times each day, and then falls asleep next to her. Her bandage covers so much of her face. She's afraid that a nasty red mark will be there when they take it off, like when she scrapped her knee and Hadya put white cloth over it so tightly. She doesn't want a big red mark on her face.

She wishes she could lie down. She wishes the boy would stop kissing her. She wishes they'd take that Goddamn bandage off.


End file.
